Philips and HDS to Deliver Next-Gen Data Management Solution for Healthcare

• Vendor Neutral Archiving solution delivers medical images from all disciplines to clinicians across multiple departments and locations within the health system in less than 3 seconds.
• Powered by Philips’ HealthSuite digital platform, solution combines standards-based interoperability, scalability and high-speed performance to help reduce costs and avoid repeat exams
  

Royal Philips N.V. announced a collaboration with Hitachi Data Systems Corporation to deliver a scalable, performance Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) solution.

A VNA is a universal data management solution in which medical images, documents and potentially other clinically relevant data are archived in a standard format, allowing them to be accessed in a vendor neutral manner by other informatics systems. The collaboration combines Philips’ expertise in enterprise medical image management solutions with Hitachi’s digital health data management capabilities. Philips plans to launch the solution in the second half of 2016, further complementing the company’s portfolio of PACS and image analysis solutions.

This advanced VNA addresses the biggest challenges healthcare organizations face in making their many millions of images, often stored in multi-vendor systems and infrastructures from various departments, available to virtually any clinician at any location within the health system. In less than 3 seconds, clinicians can access relevant multi-discipline medical imaging information in order to obtain a more complete and integrated view of an individual patient’s medical condition over time, with the aim of improving patient outcomes.

“Conventional VNA solutions have struggled to satisfy the performance and scalability requirements of large healthcare enterprises. Together with Hitachi, we have been working on the development of a robust and secure solution that will integrate the entire medical imaging portfolio in one universal data management platform that is highly scalable, standards based and delivers the performance our customers need,” said Yair Briman, SVP and GM of healthcare IT, Philips. “We know from conversations with our customers that such a solution is needed to support healthcare enterprises in their efforts to deliver better patient care at lower cost.“

With rapid advancements in medical imaging, and its increased use in the diagnosis and treatment of disease, healthcare organizations face challenges with storing and retrieving imaging data in ever-increasing volumes, varieties, and file sizes. Many of Philips’ premier health system customers are generating over 2 million medical images per week. These images range from X-ray, CT and MR-scans made by their radiology, cardiology and oncology departments to the digital photos taken by dermatology and plastic surgery as part of a consultation. A single radiology or cardiology scan, for example, can generate several hundred meabytes of data. A greater data explosion is on the horizon as digital pathology and genomics storage become more widely adopted. However, images are often still held in decentralized systems unable to connect – for example, separate radiology, cardiology and dermatology databases.

There is a growing need for an enterprise-wide solution that offers high-speed universal access to imaging data for the different clinical settings that can help contain costs, avoid repeat exams, and improve patient outcomes. For CIOs at healthcare enterprises looking to implement more effective data management strategies with centralized access using VNAs, high-speed on-demand delivery of large medical images to the clinicians who need them remains a challenge.

The Philips data management solution will leverage Philips ability to manage more than 135 billion medical images and is enabled by its HealthSuite digital-platform, an open hybrid on-premise and cloud-based platform that allows the creation of the next generation of connected health and clinical IT innovations. It will deliver high-speed performance for the universal hospital-wide management of medical images, while also adhering to the standards-based interoperability needed by institutions to leverage existing investments. Combined with HDS’ experience in information protection, consolidation, archiving and searching, the result is a scalable and flexible solution that can cope with growing amounts of data without compromising performance or speed of response. It is designed to be future-proof with the aim to integrate and store data coming from other sources such as EMRs, patient monitoring systems, and emerging technologies such as digital pathology and genomics.

“The ability to provide anytime, anywhere access to medical imaging and digital health records across the enterprise is an enormous opportunity for healthcare providers in their unending quest for better outcomes and higher quality of care,” said William A. Burns, VP, global health and life sciences, HDS. “Together with Philips, we are committed to addressing the need for integrated and homogeneous universal clinical data management and orchestration to give clinicians the access and data insights to achieve this goal.“

Philips will showcase its data management solution at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2016 Annual Meeting and Exhibition, taking place Feb. 29 – March 4, at the Sands Expo in Las Vegas, NV.