Mater Health Services Deploys Vendor Neutral Archive
1. Testimonial | Mater Health Services, Australia
Australian hospital deploys Carestream’s
Vue for Vendor Neutral Archiving to store
and view all types of clinical data from a
universal location across the organisation
As a major innovator in the delivery of
clinical services, Mater Health Services in
Queensland, Australia, is considered a
leader in its field and has a well-established
strategic plan, which incorporates
technology into its business.
Mater has a long history of clinical
innovation. “We were the first private
hospital in Queensland and one of the first
public hospitals. Mater offers care through
public and privately funded adult, women’s
and children’s services,” says Steven Parrish,
CIO and Executive Director, Information and
Infrastructure, Mater Health Services.
Mater is a mission-based organisation, adds
Mr Parrish. “Our mission is key to what we
do. We are about meeting unmet needs,
and everything that we do around Mater
focuses on achieving that mission. As we
offer both public and privately funded
services, we have a lot of flexibility in the
way we approach things. It also means that
we can try things out in both healthcare
environments. This gives us a lot of validity
when it comes to how we work and the
outcomes we achieve.”
Because of this approach, Mater has
become a leader in its field. “Mater has
become a leader because every decision we
make is around our mission and our vision.
We have to show that any solution –
whether it's technological or not – meets
our mission and values. So over the past 10
years, we've developed a lot of Information
Communication Technology (ICT) capability;
we reviewed what we had and developed
an ICT strategic plan, which was signed off
by the executive team and board. We
deliver against that plan,” says Mr Parrish.
Like many hospitals, Mater has a Picture
Archiving and Communication System
(PACS) that stores and manages clinical
images, but it was ready to take the next
step in improving workflows to access those
images across the organisation.
Mr Parrish states that “the CARESTREAM
Vue PACS system has clinical buy-in. The
clinicians view the images they want, where
they want, and when they want. That's a
key driver for us – providing our clinicians
with the right information to make the right
clinical decisions at the right time.”
Vue for Vendor Neutral Archiving –
powerful, flexible, reduces costs
The Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) is a
powerful and flexible IT solution developed
by Carestream to meet the information-
management challenges of healthcare
organisations. The VNA has the ability to
bring together disparate systems across a
healthcare enterprise.
CARESTREAM Vue for Vendor Neutral
Archive is a powerful and flexible
combination of archive and viewer that
satisfies the information-management
challenges of an evolving healthcare
industry. It reduces operating costs while
enhancing patient care. The archive
preserves information in a neutral format,
and is available across the enterprise
for access.
2. Testimonial | Mater Health Services, Australia
After deploying CARESTREAM Vue PACS at
Mater, the next step was to implement the
VNA, Mr Parrish says. “The key driver for us
was around electronic images. It was about
taking our film-based imaging services into
an electronic world. We already had a PACS
for our CT and MRI, but we decided that
wasn't meeting our needs. We then decided
that we'd find something that could
encompass all the imaging modalities that
we had at Mater to give us more value than
just a filmless radiology department.”
For Mater, implementing PACS and VNA
was part of a future strategy for expansion.
“One of the key drivers initially was to store
radiology images. However, we are now
finding that more than 60 percent of
everything stored in VNA is no longer
radiology-specific. We very much see the
VNA as a core part of our imaging modality,
archiving, and viewing strategy. In simple
terms, any image at Mater should be
within the CARESTREAM PACS and VNA
systems, because that is the single point
for clinicians to access and view
anything that is image-related to a
patient.”
This accessibility, from one universal
repository at the point of care, was an
important part of Mater’s decision to use
the Carestream systems. Mr Parrish explains,
“For us, the VNA is about provision of any
image at any time. We've used it very much
as a single place to store and archive
anything that has an image attached to it,
which we were never able to do before.”
VNA is about more than archiving –
it’s improving workflow and access
The VNA seamlessly consolidates disparate
imaging systems into one repository using
the latest interoperability standards.
Combined with CARESTREAM Vue Motion
(a universal image viewer), the Vue Archive
VNA provides secure, real-time imaging,
accessible at an enterprise level and beyond.
This universal accessibility ties in with
Mater’s mission, says Mr Parrish. “Mater is
committed to a holistic approach to
healthcare in response to changing
community needs, which include those
outside of our core campus. We are
currently building a new Mater Private
Hospital at Springfield. It is an 84-bed
hospital but master-planned for up to1200
beds. We are looking at how we engage
with communities to better their health
outcomes. We are looking at breaking
down the walls between acute care and
primary care and making sure that we work
together for the best outcome for the
patient.”
VNA is all about improving enterprise
workflow and access, in what is usually a
sprawling IT ecosystem. “At Mater, we
previously had very siloed image-
collection centres. We now have it all
centralised so that our staff can see all
the videos from theatre, all our
ophthalmology photos and videos, all
the patient photos from a wound
perspective – all of this is in our VNA for
viewing at any time,” adds Mr Parrish.
Using a zero-footprint universal viewer
enables multiple users to collaborate across
the continuum of care. This is an added
benefit of VNA, explains Mr Parrish. “Our
clinicians have the ability to access data
internally or remotely. This has reduced their
need to come into the hospital after-hours
because they have the information available
to hand.”
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