Tags: PACS

How the market finally caught up with the Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) promise

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I hope you spotted the great news that came in at the end of last month that the most trusted name in the IT commentary world, Gartner, rated us extremely highly in that part of the market known as the VNA.

VNA is not the sexiest term for a technology ever, I’ll grant you – but actually, it’s a really important tool and one that could really help a lot of people.

That’s because the name – it stands for ‘Vendor-Neutral Archive’ – doesn’t really convey what its power or potential actually is. We know – we’ve been marketing some excellent VNA solutions, especially for the NHS market, for a number of years now, and the vagueness of that name has perhaps not been to its help.

Why? Because NHS buyers see the VNA as in, essence, a medical device… it’s a bit of software that is good for storing my medical imaging data, specifically all the PACS and DICOM data that I needed to find a safe and secure home for when the old off-site PACS storage NPfIT contracts came to an end in 2015.

Which it is – a VNA is a fantastic way to store very large data files and access them really easily. But that was never what a VNA was only supposed to do. That’s because, out of the gate, you had this really cool XDS tech built into it – XDS standing for ‘Cross Enterprise Document Sharing’.

Why XDS is so useful is that it is a standards-based way to work with multiple forms of content, of all different types. That means that a VNA isn’t actually just a place to stick big X-ray image files, though please carry on doing so… it’s actually an Enterprise or Document Management System.

Why should I care, I hear you thinking? Well, a VNA might not be a whole lot of use to a manufacturer, a retailer or a financial services CIO.

But if you are

  • an NHS CCIO or CIO trying to help colleagues in different departments
  • and/or an NHS CCIO or CIO tasked with helping connect records with other stakeholders
  • a local authority social care team looking to join up information on vulnerable or elderly patients to help address their complex, cross-team needs
  • a GP surgery looking for better ways to document the patient journey
  • a CCG committed to more paperless ways of working with patient data
  • a policymaker in an NHS England STP (Sustainability and Transformation Project) interested in the power of digital to revolutionise patient care

Well, then – yes – what a VNA can do suddenly becomes absolutely central. How: because it’s the proven, available and tested way to keep all patient data – from notes to prescription charges to medical imagery to social care interactions – in one place.

And from cradle to archiving – across multiple stakeholders.

In that Gartner report, that route of travel has been clearly signaled. The good news is that here at SynApps Solutions, we spotted the potential for this years back, and have accumulated relevant expertise and intelligence on doing just this kind of Super-VNA work (and have some significant trails underway to make a VNA-based Shared Care Record a reality – an in months, not years).

It’s brilliant to see that Gartner has caught up with us – but we’re not boasting, we’re just saying that we are ready whenever you are.

Let’s work together to make VNA do what you and your patients and service users really need it to.

Chris Brice is SynApps Solutions’ Director of Sales and Marketing

SynApps Takes A Look Forward To 2016

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150116Can I first wish you a great 2016! I hope the return to work hasn’t been too much of a shock to the system. Perhaps, console yourself with the happy thought of how slim you’ll soon be with that new gym membership. Ahem.

Moving swiftly on, as they say; when we last spoke before the break , I shared some thoughts on how I saw 2015 as a year in our growth. Well, this time, it’s a bit of crystal ball time: what does this bright young year of 2016 look to hold for us here? Here’s our take.

We’ll See Our NHS Business Continue To Grow

We plan to consolidate and grow our opportunity in the health service, an absolutely vital market to us. We will grow our footprint in key Trusts but also extend our visibility with CCGs and other stakeholders. As we know, collaboration, cross-team and cross-organisation, is the route of travel here as part of both the Five Year Forward View but also the best response to a tough November Spending Review.

We anticipate some of that will extend out of the NHS and into other parts of local government and social care, even the private sector. Contracts that span three or four once very separate organisations will become the norm, I predict, and very soon. Here, the driver is probably not going to be VNA and DICOM so much as efficient workflows. Email is a terrible way for big teams to work together – we all know this. So content collaboration and document sharing will come to the fore, acting as a lubricating mechanism to get better, slicker co-operation going. That’s going to help patients and the NHS, and we are looking forward to seeing as much of it as possible! (What’s great is how our chosen DM/ECM platforms of EMC Documentum and Alfresco dovetail just so well into this kind of work.)

We’ll Help NHS Bodies Save Money

Cash is the problem for the NHS right now, as we all know. The government’s given it a billion to help with technology, but most commentators are saying the service really needs a lot more to meet all its ambitions around the move to paperless. Meanwhile, it’s being asked to find at least £22bn (some say that’s really more like £24bn, considering some got pushed ‘ahead’ in the balance sheet of the 2010-15 efficiency drive) of savings.

Technology has got to be central to that. And we expect to be in the thick of it: not just on the PACS supplement/replacement front, but in lots of things like storage; moving to putting more and more content and documentation in the cloud and off physical storage will save money by definition. We are also going to be making a quiet and very useful contribution helping to rationalise data out of various expensive or legacy silos, as is the case in 90% of Trusts, into more sensible common repository, based on our standards-centric stores.

A Bigger Role For Our Hospital Visual Media Service

And finally, we expect a lot of interest for our recently-enhanced ConXPhoto service, which we rebranded ConXMedia at the end of last year . Trusts always needed to capture and store a lot of photos to help patients and track cases; that need’s never been greater, and now video and medical imagery’s being thrown in the mix too.

As a result, I predict this area will become an important one to us – and also, of course, of genuine practical help to nurses, doctors, radiologists and administrators in the Trusts we work with, all of whom want to safely and efficiently store and manage this data asset.

So – there are my best guesses for the next few months. Will I be proven right? Only one way to find out – let’s shake off the last of the festive merry-making and begin a busy and interesting 2016!

Happy New Year,

Mark

Mark Winstone is SynApps’s Joint CEO and Sales & Marketing Director

VNA – Where Are We Now?

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10 December 2015 – Jason Scholes, a co-founder of SynApps, has taken time out to detail his thoughts on the state of the VNA nation.

Jason’s particularly interested in detailing the progress of NHS Trusts in using and benefitting from VNA (vendor neutral archive) based clinical content systems.

He argues that, while the VNA route is a great way to reduce the costs of running PACS and other image systems side-by-side, using the VNA as a standards-based way of creating a single method for working with all sorts of data, not just image, is the next and really beneficial step.

Few Trusts have woken up to this great way to home-brew their own EPR, he notes, before asking what might be stopping them? The fear of the unknown, perhaps. Jason addresses this and many other pertinent VNA points in this excellent overview; find out more here

Is Vendor Neutral Archiving the best building block for a digital patient record?

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With the National Programme for IT fading into the rear-view mirror, new storage contracts for many NHS Trusts need to be sourced. The good news is that this doesnt have to be a problem – and indeed, could be a real opportunity to find new ways of working with patient data of all sorts, thinks Mark Winstone of SynApps Solutions. Read more from IDMi magazine here – IDMi_Nov15

SynApps coverage in Bdaily: The DNA of VNA

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October 30, 2015 – Tony Backhouse, the Head of the Health Practice at SynApps Solutions, has got some great attention in an important online business publication, Bdaily.

The publication had asked him for his views on how the shake-up of England’s medical imaging market could open the door to achieving a true EPR.

Tony was happy to guide readers on how VNA is a standards-based way of extending PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System) services to incorporate DICOM and other format content.

That, he advised, is going to be key to making the sharing of medical data easier for clinicians, as well as making patient records available across any combination of service providers.

“All a VNA is really doing is to extend your proven, workhorse PACS systems by adding a new dimension to the medical images you already need to capture and share,” Tony says.

“By applying a content management approach to your VNA-based medical records, you can make sharing medical data easier and more practical – as well as incorporating lifecycle management and retention policies to support information governance requirements using standard interfaces, which is what the Department of Health wants everyone in UK health informatics to be doing.

“It’s also sensible to use technology we know works in one part of the NHS and extend it to help in other areas, avoiding many of the mistakes we made in the Programme, and also opening up NHS information ‘silos.’”

He concludes:

“Put all this together, and you can see why VNA is swiftly becoming a promising new option for an NHS-wide approach to electronic medical records.”

Tony was also able to get a great shout-out in for our growing roster of successful NHS Trusts working with SynApps to do just what he explains in his article:

“And for a growing band of major [NHS customers], our Vendor Neutral Archive platform is doing just that – extending a central PACS repository to become a key component of a new generation of virtual EPRs.”

Check it out for yourself here

J4Care And What It Brings To The SynApps Healthcare Story

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We are a software company located in Vienna, Austria, with a focus on VNA (Vendor Neutral Archiving) and DICOM viewing and reporting.

We were founded in 2007 by a group of experienced PACS engineers, who wanted to do something that was a) based on open standards and b) used Web technology as its basis. From those beginnings, we delivered our first solutions in 2009, and we now have an install base of around 80 customers – mostly in Northern Europe, some in Africa and the Middle East and so on, but we have had most of our success in the Netherlands, Belgium, England, Austria and Finland.

The two core products we have are a VNA and a viewer, both based on standards and which can also be sold as two independent products. We have customers who have both the VNA and the viewer, but we also have customers that just have the VNA and customers that just have the viewer. In terms of who those customers are, they are hospitals: regional ones that share medical imaging amongst each other; national organisations (for instance, two of our main projects are the national medical imaging archive of Finland and the national viewing of images system for Estonia); and at the other end of the spectrum, diagnostic centres and diagnostic laboratories, which are relatively small but will do a lot of works for GPs, say. In England, of course, we are working with Acute Trusts.

In terms of functionality: we are one of the few VNA suppliers to allow clinicians the chance to do full diagnostic work with our viewer. We are one of the few full Web-based diagnostic workstations. Many suppliers out there have a viewer, but it is not equipped for radiology diagnostic work – clinicians can look at the images, but they cannot take a full diagnosis on what they see and usually need special workstations. With our solution, everything can be done through the web.

Away from proprietary

The key to our success is “Open” standards. We aim to be the most compliant VNA and viewer solution in the market, so we can integrate easily with any other supplier and are furthest along supporting various standards in the field. That’s very important for our customers, as they know those standards are being supported and we are continuously up to date with that.

Standards are also incredibly important in the healthcare marketplace.  That’s because so many healthcare organisations want to exchange information amongst each other and if you have your own proprietary way of doing it, it is often very difficult to connect between hospitals and regions.

Last but not least

And, of course, SynApps Solutions is a big factor in our success. It’s our distribution and implementation partner for the United Kingdom – and anything we deploy in England goes via SynApps. We focus on technology development and work with local partners to do all the marketing, sales, support, and use our software for their businesses.

Marcel Swennenhuis is one of the leaders of core tech partner J4Care, an innovative software company that’s helping medical professionals, as well as patients, by enabling easy, safe and fast storage and access to complete medical records

Next time Marcel will be taking a look into emerging customer demand around non-DICOM, for both Medical Photography and Patient Records-type customers

VNA Based Content Approaches Of Increasing Interest To NHS Trusts

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Four major NHS organisations select a Vendor Neutral Archive based clinical and patient data system from SynApps Solutions, built on EMC’s Documentum

 

Maidenhead, UK, 30th June, 2015 – Content management leader SynApps Solutions isdelighted to announce that four NHS hospital organisations have now selected a Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) content platform, based on the Enterprise Content Management System (ECMS) Documentum® from EMC Corporation, as a standards-based route for next-generation patient data handling.

 

The Trusts are Croydon Health Services NHS Trust, London’s Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust , Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust and Northampton General Hospital, the partners confirmed today.

 

SynApps and EMC helping Chief Clinical Information Officers

 

Croydon Health Services provide acute and community healthcare services across the borough, with 3,500 staff servicing a catchment of 380,000. Its Chief Clinical Information Officer, Dr. Tony Newman-Sanders, confirmed that, “In the past several years we have been working with other organisations across our health community in South West London on how to use the opportunity of re-procuring our picture archiving and communication system [PACS] and associated image data store to do it all better second time around.”

 

London’s Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is a district general hospital supporting 350,000 service users. “We feel we are making real a long-term vision of VNA and electronic data and content management, all living in one unified repository with the SynApps solution,” said its Deputy Director of Information Management & Technology, Norman Harling.

 

Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust is one of the largest and busiest hospital trusts in the North of England with an annual budget of over £400m. 

Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust provides general acute services for a population of 380,000 and hyper-acute stroke, vascular and renal services to a population of 684,000.  The Trust is also an accredited cancer centre and provides cancer services to a wider population of nearly 900,000. “Our new SynApps on-site VNA has a zero-footprint viewer, which means clinicians (and ultimately patients) can look at images on any device, including tablets,” comments Christina Malcolmson, Deputy Director of ICT. “At the moment, that’s just PACS images – but we will grow it and include other images and documents, so we can have a full EPR over time,” she added.

Commenting on securing four major UK Trusts for a VNA-based content approach built on EMC’s Documentum, SynApps Solutions’ Managing Director, Jim Whitelaw, noted, “We are delighted to be working with our key technology partner EMC to help these NHS bodies get ready for a truly 21st century approach to Health IT provision.”
“We are proud to collaborate with SynApps to deliver a proven, enterprise-class, joint solution focused on enabling the NHS transformation toward a truly patient centered healthcare,” comments Michael Graetz, VP of EMEA Healthcare sales Enterprise Content Division, EMC.

About SynApps

SynApps is an independent services and solutions company specialising in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies. Founded in 2003 by former Documentum services professionals, the company provides consultancy, implementation and support services for EMC Documentum, and has authored a suite of content integration solutions, ConXApps, which allow businesses to quickly maximise their investment in ECM technologies. Organisations across healthcare, government and commercial markets rely on SynApps solutions and services to capture and share knowledge more dynamically and efficiently.

Find out more at synapps-solutions.com, or follow the firm on Twitter @Synappssol

EMC and Documentum are trademarks or registered trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries.