Tags: VNA

We’ve Improved ConXPhoto And It’s Now ConXMedia

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111215ConXPhoto is a great system we developed in partnership with NHS customers.

It helps hospitals better manage their growing mountain of internally-captured medical pictures – items like photos of wounds, bedsores or patient conditions and so on. These all get photographed by nurses and technicians and are of great use, but they end up poorly filed, stored and managed, and we wanted to offer Trusts a better way of automating and controlling that process.

Today we’re going to tell you about the next chapter in ConXPhoto’s evolution. It’s being extended and upgraded to become ConXMedia instead. You may not be too surprised to learn why; as hospitals used to the system, they started asking why they couldn’t use it to manage other media, like videos and other imagery.

And we see great potential in doing just that – of offering an easy and reliable way for hospital administrators and clinicians alike of having a control panel to work with all the multiple forms of images, they want to.

Underneath the hood here is our full-power Content Management System, which is allied to the standards we know help NHS information mangers the most – VNA (vendor neutral archive) and cross document sharing (XDS). The combination of a CMS, a VNA and XDS capability when it comes to patient imagery is a very powerful one.

As an example, we can easily ingest vast amounts of images, in bulk, across the department. We can store them properly and share them safely and appropriately via XDS. All your access and confidentiality/compliance issues get dealt with in one go, basically.

This is all delivered in the form of a highly cost-effective IT system that reduces your admin and ups the efficiency of your team. I am also delighted to say that a major partner is making the move from ‘Photo’ to ‘Media’ – the team at our long-term customer Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

Look for more details and specifics about ConXMedia on the site soon. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the extended product, please feel free to contact me or your SynApps Solutions sales contact, and we’d be delighted to help answer your questions.

Jason Scholes
Co-Founder
SynApps Solutions

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

VNA: A Whole Hospital Opportunity

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041019-N-5821P-019Now that VNA (vendor neutral archive) based clinical content systems are becoming more and more mainstream in UK hospitals, it’s worth reviewing what it is we’re looking for out of them – and how far we may need to go to get there.

A lot of hospital CIOs have been taking the VNA route in the short term as a way to reduce the costs of running PACS and other image systems side-by-side. But more than a few of them have a longer term view in mind; using the VNA as a standards-based way of creating a single method for working with all sorts of data, not just images – as a back-door, but very pragmatic, way of getting to the electronic patient record promised by the National Programme but which hasn’t happened.

Making that latter aim a practicality and taking the next step beyond DICOM is where a lot of Trusts are paused right now. There’s interest in putting data in the VNA, as hospitals look to the Paperless NHS target of 2018-20 and want to make better use of patient data, keyed to the central NHS Patient Number.

We have been working with a number of Trusts that got that far, and have also been able to go further. We’d like to share some hints and tips about their learning about what to do next.

VNAs are ways to create platforms for the long-term archiving of DICOM format image data, typically as produced at volume in a hospital’s Radiology department. What’s been driving interest in them recently, as a by-product of the winding down of the National Programme for IT, is that there’s been a lot of ‘repatriation’ of DICOM imagery, but repatriation to this newer technology rather than to a standard PACS system. That’s partly due to an interest in collating all sorts of image files, so cardiology and echocardiogram and so on, into one place for clinician access, as a way to improve access but also better store and archive all this content.

So much dead data

So when making this move to a VNA, what we do know for certain? We know that you’re going to end up with a lot of data. For a start, it’s a question of volume. Few people – maybe only you and your team in IT? – will realise how much data has been accumulated.

So an important first step is cleaning that data up. Some of it can be summarised, some will be corrupt and can be deleted. There is clearly a project around data protection and retention and your policies around those issues. This is a great opportunity to get rid of dead data you don’t need any more, saving disk and tape cost at a stroke.

What you need to try and end up with is a purged set of data you know is important and needs to be accessible. Obviously, that has practical implications for both storage and access. The first storage element is IT’s job, but the second part is going to be about talking with internal stakeholders to identify just what departments want to put into the VNA and what they will want to pull out of it. You can start with Radiology as they will need access. But who else?

That’s where a VNA can start to add value. This is where other sorts of content, like stored photographs, videos, endoscopy files, patient medical records needs to be fed in. Getting that DICOM and non-DICOM content in one place is the objective, but it’s also a cross-enterprise, cross-departmental task that will need proper planning and co-operation around the Trust.

I’m going to put my neck out a bit and say that that’s where a lot of wheels are spinning right now. You have to have a strategy and it’s got to be one that all the stakeholders not just understand but buy in to. And to be honest, you can’t buy a strategy off the shelf from a vendor. To get the most out of a VNA, you are going to have to sit down and plan, with department heads, starting with Radiology but radiating out from there, about the best ways of handling all your data.

Next time we speak, let’s discuss what our Trust VNA customers are telling us is the best way to address that issue. The good news is that they have – and the interest in using a VNA as far more than a DICOM repatriation platform is spreading across the whole NHS.

Jason Scholes
Co-Founder
SynApps Solutions

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

Why Are Trusts Interested In Non-DICOM Solutions Right Now? A View From Industry Experts J4Care

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Img_blog49Let’s find out more about one of our most important technology partners here at SynApps Solutions, J4Care, whose global Marketing and Sales Director, Marcel Swennenhuis, shares his views on the non-DICOM aspect to the health IT market

Emerging customer demand around non-DICOM

Patient records are a combination of medication information, documents, reports, patient history – and also typically images, both DICOM images, e.g. radiology, as well as non-DICOM ones, which could be dermatology pictures or other pictures of a patient.

The problem is that all those types of content are spread over different systems and in different formats. For a doctor, that can be very frustrating, because to get a complete view of the patient he often has to go to different systems, to get to what he needs to know about a patient.

That is not ideal. Doctors are starting to say, ‘Just give me one way of looking at an entire patient record, including radiology images, cardiology, dermatology and medication!’ Because that is a lot easier, clearly. I hear from a lot of medics that they only have a few minutes to talk to a patient during a consultation – and if they have to log into three or four different systems, it’s unmanageable and they won’t do it. They have to ask the patient ‘Please tell me what kind of medication you are using,’ and ‘Can you bring me a CD with the back X-ray images’. Information should be simple to access and available, in one place. That is the marketplace demand we are seeing more and more of.

The curse of the silo

The reason we’re at this point: silos. Historically, each and every department in a hospital had their own ‘silo’ of information. They all had their own database with information that had to do with their specialisation.

There’s another IT aspect to this to consider. Hospital IT departments are buying more and more archives/storage from different vendors. They have to go to one particular company for storing their radiology data, then another for storing the cardiology information, then to another for storing the medication information etc.

The problem that results from that is that it is very difficult to keep everything in line. They would like to have just one system where everything is stored about a patient.

The good news is that with more modern systems, especially VNAs, we are getting to a more integrated view of the patient, driven by the doctors, who want everything together.

The 2018 paperless NHS target

In the UK, there has been a drive to create a unified patient record, and there is an NHS paperless target for 2018. What’s interesting is, this ambition is far from being a UK-one only – it’s European wide, although manifesting itself differently in different countries.

Finland has, for instance, said it wants one integral view of the patient, with everything digitised in a centralised way, so it is setting up one central system where all hospitals are required to send important data, then any other hospital or any GP can access it, even the patient. The goal is to get rid of paper and see the end of patients running around with CDs or documents if they visit another hospital.

In The Netherlands, they are also trying to digitise everything – however, here there is a completely non-centralised approach. Each hospital is individually aiming for digitisation, then connecting to all the other hospitals so that, with all kinds of protocols and security, each hospital can look into the data of the other.

Estonia is also following the Finnish centralised route – which we’re helping by implementing one integrated viewer for all images, across the country; we are also doing a project in the region around Johannesburg (South Africa), which is following a centralised approach for 30+ hospitals to share patient-data. In England it’s more of a semi-centralised approach, which is closer to the Dutch model.

Marcel Swennenhuis works at our 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