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How VNA’s Connect the Full Patient Picture

Almost every clinical practitioner, regardless of his or her specialty, uses images to care for patients. And while radiology and cardiology still generate the majority of all clinical imaging volumes, today’s healthcare facilities have expanded their imaging reliance far beyond these two service lines. Take a physical therapist, for example, recording a video of a patient’s knee range-of-motion, or a dermatologist taking a picture of a patient’s skin lesion before a biopsy.

Each of these various specialty departments rely on their own imaging formats, which are uploaded to their own source system, and stored away in their own departmental silo. What often results from this type of imaging strategy is a fragmented view of the full patient health picture. Think of a “patient puzzle,” with each anatomical piece being scattered throughout the enterprise. If this sounds familiar (and is part of what keeps you up at night), don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Many enterprises are still figuring out how to achieve a comprehensive enterprise imaging strategy – one that supports seamless point-of-care image capture followed by unrestricted content access across the organization. Thankfully, a vendor-neutral archive (VNA) is specifically-designed to achieve that exact goal.

A VNA captures, stores, and manages every form of digital content that’s associated with a patient and clinical study, regardless of the content’s originating format, location, or storage system. For Synapse VNA2020’s Best in KLAS award winner – the platform uses its various workflow solutions to unify that full patient health picture that’s dispersed across your enterprise. They also automatically associate the content with a patient record, and make it available to other providers who may need it.  Using specific tool sets, the solutions are designed for the following activities:

PATIENT/STUDY DETAILS

  • Patient demographics
  • Electronic Health Record (EHR) Context Sharing
  • Encounters-based workflows

IMAGE CAPTURE

  • Point-of-care image capture
  • Standards-based system integration
  • Software development kit

CONTENT DISTRIBUTION

  • Image availability notification
  • Health information exchange
  • Custom integration

Below is a quick snapshot of Synapse VNA’s solutions, and how they connect today’s various specialty departments by using standards-based intelligence workflows:

  • Connext Point-of-Care Worklists – DICOM MWL Q/R or RESTful web services allow point-of-care modalities and imaging systems to retrieve patient demographics for encounters-based procedures and store content.
  • Connext Mobile – Mobile app captures photos, videos, audio recordings, and notes. Launch with patient context directly from the EHR, or select patients from the integrated, department-specific point-of-care worklist. Supports configurable attributes and restricted workflows (for VIP patients or abuse victims).
  • Connext Web – Web portal to upload any clinical content. Catch-all tool when other automated methods cannot be deployed. This can also be launched with patient context directly from the EHR, or you can select patients from the integrated, department-specific point-of-care worklist. The solution also supports configurable attributes and restricted workflows (for VIP patients or abuse victims).
  • Connext SDK – RESTful and SOAP web services upload clinical content and query/retrieve patient information.
  • DICOM – Traditional DICOM services to query (C-FIND), retrieve (C-MOVE) and store (C-STORE) DICOM objects.
  • DICOMweb™ – DICOM standard for web-based medical imaging. RESTful services to search for (QIDO) and retrieve(WADO-URI/WAD-RS) content.
  • HL7® FHIR® – RESTful web service to create, read, update and delete DocumentReference FHIR resources.
  • HL7 file uploads – HL7 messages from the source system include patient demographics, and content metadata. Files can be included in the message, or retrieved from a location specified in the message.
  • Shared directory – Process to monitor a shared folder for new content stored by the source system; VNA ingests data and parses demographics from the object.
  • XDS – Supports the exchange documents and images across the healthcare enterprise as a cross-enterprise document sharing (XDS) Document Source and Document Repository, and XDS-I.B Imaging Document Source and Document Repository. Also provides XDS connectivity for data acquired through other connector methods.

With healthcare facilities continuing to expand their imaging volumes, the time is now to start thinking about why your enterprise imaging strategy needs to start with a VNA, you can read more on that here. If you’re interested in learning more about Synapse VNA’s solutions specifically, and seeing some real-world examples of how the solutions can connect the full patient picture across your enterprise, check out our Synapse VNA Connext Workflow Solutions eBrochure.

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