GE Healthcare launches VNA

A new vendor neutral archive that adopts a four-level model for medical information management was launched at EHI Live 2012 by GE Healthcare.

GE says that its new offering, the Centricity Clinical Archive, helps connect and share information across multiple departments, specialties, locations and vendors, through a breadth of interoperability standards.

Its core feature is a multi-site clinical content repository that enables consolidation of IT infrastructure for archiving and managing unstructured medical content such as images, reports and documents using industry standards, DICOM and IHE-XDS.

It is also “multi-ology”; providing access to clinical information for staff across specialties, such as cardiology and radiology, offering a patient-centric rather than a departmental view of images and other content.

GE says that the VNA’s enterprise-wide zero footprint clinical viewer and IHE-XDS registry provide anywhere, anytime/near instant access to a patient clinical record.

A master patient index links patient records across network boundaries, while the messaging interface engine combines workflow systems like HIS and RIS to update an information repository and keep information consistent across systems.

It also equips IT administrators with a choice of virtual server deployment to save data centre space, disaster recovery by connecting to cloud storage, and high reliability with standardised configurations.

GE’s vice-president and general manager for healthcare IT in EMEA, Olivier Croly, told eHealth Insider: “What we bring to the table is the fact that we can run massive data and be robust. It’s safe and it’s really open.”

Karen Senior, UK and Ireland sales manager and a former radiographer, said that clinicians needed to be able to access data, be sure that it was safe and be sure that the system they were using was going somewhere in the future and not going to leave data sitting in a warehouse.

The four levels of the VNA take users from the level one DICOM archive to level four which is described as a “cross-enterprise information gateway.”

Croly said the archive provided a very open environment which was neutral to PACS, neutral to storage and neutral to viewers.

GE has published a case study from Västra Götaland, Sweden’s second largest region, to support the launch.

The region partnered with GE to develop an infrastructure that linked its 17 hospitals through a shared clinical archive that provided common access to images and reports while allowing each department to maintain their independent PACS/RIS systems and their own unique workflows.