Carestream’s Powerful Vendor-Neutral Archive Can Equip Clinicians with a Holistic View of Patient Data to Help Enhance Care

ROCHESTER, N.Y., May 21 (SIIM 2013 Booth #403-405) — Carestream’s vendor-neutral archive that unites DICOM and non-DICOM data from disparate clinical systems will be showcased at the 2013 Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) meeting held June 6-9 in Grapevine (Dallas), Texas. In addition to helping equip clinicians with a comprehensive view of patient clinical information, CARESTREAM Vue for Vendor-Neutral Archive can simplify and consolidate storage resources to simultaneously help reduce costs and enhance workflow by eliminating departmental silos of clinical information.

This archiving solution is available as an on-site or cloud-based solution and can be accessed anywhere, anytime using Carestream’s zero-footprint, Web-based Vue Motion image viewer. The viewer allows physicians to review information quickly and easily on Web-enabled devices like the iPad.     

In addition to offering clinical advantages, vendor-neutral archives offer significant advantages to IT managers and staff by reducing or eliminating the need to manage and support disparate departmental systems. A consolidated archive also simplifies future storage expansion and facilitates disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.   

“Our Vue Archive consolidates disparate departmental systems into one repository using the latest interoperability standards,” said Cristine Kao, Carestream’s Global Marketing Director for Healthcare Information Solutions. “Combining this enterprise-wide archiving solution with our Vue Motion image viewer provides secure, real-time information access that not only improves efficiency but can also help enhance care by providing a more holistic view of the patient.”

At Rochester General Health System (Rochester, N.Y.), a unified radiology and cardiology PACS was implemented along with a virtualized vendor-neutral archive that provides online storage of 230,000 imaging studies annually and will store non-DICOM clinical information in the future. Clinicians have rapid, easy access to information from the VNA or the system-wide EMR using a zero footprint viewer.

“Our unified approach to IT system consolidation and simplification enabled our radiologists to more quickly access historical studies from our PACS, since all information is now online. Radiologist productivity, decision support and clinical learning have all benefited from easy access to historical information,” said Chuck O’Brien, RIS/PACS Administrator at Rochester General Health System.

Compelling Advantages Benefit IT Staffs and Clinicians

Carestream’s vendor-neutral archive provides these essential capabilities:

• Adheres to open standards to enable consolidation of data while addressing the workflow and archiving needs of each department. In addition to DICOM and non-DICOM data, it supports text-based information, scanned PDF documents and JPEG images through use of XDS/XDS-I standards.
• Ensures both data integrity and synchronization, which is essential for a unified view of patient data and a global worklist. Powerful metadata manipulation techniques, such as DICOM tag morphing, plus support for PIX (patient identifier cross referencing), and a master patient index (MPI) enable viewing of all patient documents regardless of the search field. Data synchronization also equips a multi-site VNA installation to provide geographically dispersed disaster recovery and business continuity.
• Supports the ability to migrate descriptive DICOM header information (metadata) independently from the DICOM image. This capability delivers convenient, affordable migration of large amounts of data, even over low-bandwidth networks.   
• Applies automated information lifecycle management rules to manage data retention and reduce data management costs and manual tasks.

“Vendor-neutral archives deliver compelling advantages for IT staffs, clinicians and others involved in patient care. Healthcare providers can also choose to deploy VNA as a managed cloud service to further reduce expenses and management requirements,” Kao added.    

For more information on Carestream’s healthcare IT solutions visit www.carestream.com or www.carestream.com/SIIM.

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About Carestream Health

Carestream Health is a worldwide provider of dental and medical imaging systems and healthcare IT solutions; X-ray film and digital X-ray systems for non-destructive testing; and advanced materials for the precision films and electronics markets. For more information about the company’s broad portfolio of products, solutions and services, please contact your Carestream Health representative or visit www.carestream.com.

CARESTREAM is a trademark of Carestream Health.