by
Nancy Ryerson, Staff Writer | February 06, 2013
From the January/February 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
For now, most customers use the cloud for what is known as “deep archive”: images and related information that was gathered more than six months ago. Cloud storage is also popular for disaster recovery plans, a concern that received greater attention following last October’s Superstorm Sandy, vendors say.
“We can take DICOM exams from any PACS, from any premise, and put them in a tier four data center, which means it’s going to be highly secure, private and impervious to most natural disasters and power failures,” says Frank Baker, VP of sales and business development at Coactiv, which offers a disaster recovery cloud called EXAM Vault. “And for a relatively small fee, you now have a copy of every single exam in a safe harbor.”
Beyond “deep archive,” cloud vendors hope to encourage customers to use cloud service for managing images and information online.
“That’s where a very big challenge is right now, of persuading customers that cloud vendors can be your storage and archive provider, rather than just replacing your truck-based model where a truck comes every week and takes your records someplace,” says Daher of Frost & Sullivan. He says cloud archiving is in its early adopter phase, while cloud-based PACS are in an even earlier phase. Daher predicts that growth for cloud usage will be “linear, not exponential.”
Novarad's NovaPACS MultiFrame view.
The “best-of-breed” approach
As for the next incarnation of PACS, some experts feel that just as VNA can potentially take the “A” out of PACS, each element of PACS can be separated out and made into a modular solution, with separate vendors for diagnostic imaging and workflow as well as for archiving.
“You bring in your first choice for each component and make it work as an integrated system once in place,” says Daher of Frost & Sullivan.
While this “best-of-breed” approach is currently in its early adoption phase, some radiologists are looking forward to its potential benefits for improving the viewing and manipulation element of PACS.
“I hope that as VNA and back-end functionality become commodities that PACS vendors can then return to focus on images and the radiologist, a focus I believe they have lost,” says Channin of Guthrie Clinic.
