INFINITT North America, a leading provider of image and information management technologies for healthcare, recently implemented a Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) for Prime Healthcare Services (PHS), a progressive and rapidly expanding hospital management company headquartered in Ontario, California.

Prime Healthcare Services and the non-profit Prime Healthcare Foundation own and operate 23 acute care hospitals nationwide, with a total of 4,434 inpatient beds. The communities they serve span the country, ranging from San Bernardo, San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange and Shasta Counties in California, to communities in Nevada, Texas, Kansas and Pennsylvania.

When Raghu Chennareddy, Corporate Director Imaging Systems for Prime Healthcare Management, began planning for a centralized storage facility near their corporate offices in California, he was designing it primarily as a redundant archive to provide Disaster Recovery. 

But in the course of researching his options, he saw the advantages of going to an enterprise-class Vendor Neutral Archive. With multiple IT departments supporting local PACS from a variety of vendors-including GE, Siemens, McKesson, NovaRad, Sectra and INFINITT—he realized that neutralizing the DICOM metadata would reduce management complexity, lower the total cost of ownership and eliminate the need for data migrations when replacing departmental PACS in the future.

Now, only six months from the planning stage, seven PHS hospitals are sending studies to the EMC Centera Archive, with INFINITT software performing DICOM tag morphing to standardize the incoming data and enable universal access to images and reports from a single viewer. PHS expects to have ten hospitals sending data by the end of 2013.

The expected benefits of implementing Infinitt’s VNA solution are: 

    • Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity: The enterprise-class VNA will enable PHS to restore images and reports to any of the hospitals in case of failure or damage to the local image archive. They can also operate from the VNA during any interim period.

    • Reduced Management Complexity: With one archive instead of many, PHS will be able to address security, monitoring and maintenance in one location, with reduced IT staffing. By storing images and reports in a neutralized or universal format, PHS will also simplify integration.

    • Lower Total Cost of Ownership: Reducing the number of servers and physical space will reduce costs, and storage volumes can increase substantially without increasing physical space or staff requirements. As previously stated, the VNA will enable PHS to avoid future data migrations due to changes in PACS, infrastructure or upgrades.

    • Support High Availability: With Virtualized Server technology, the enterprise VNA will minimize downtime as it allows PHS to reallocate resources and swap out servers without any disruption in service.

    • Freedom and Flexibility: With a fully replicated VNA, PHS will gain possession and control over images and data from all of their hospitals, freeing them from vendor lock and ensuring the flexibility to adopt new technologies as they become available.

Chennareddy also recognizes Life Cycle Management and "Big Data" benefits that may be realized in the long-term. But for now, the over-riding incentive for going over to the VNA architecture is that it will give PHS cost-effective, centralized storage that can be easily managed, and that is fully scalable to meet future requirements as they bring more facilities under the Prime Healthcare umbrella.

About INFINITT North America

INFINITT North America, located in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of INFINITT Healthcare, a global company with more than 2700 PACS installations in 43 countries. Infinitt's web-based image and information management solutions include RIS, PACS, Cardiology PACS, Mammo PACS, Dental PACS, Ophthalmology PACS and 3D/Advanced Visualization software operating on a single database. This architecture increases system reliability, reduces costs and support requirements and simplifies workflow. INFINITT Mobile Viewer and ULite zero footprint viewer are just two of the new products added to the INFINITT product line.