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Defining VNA

By Jim Knaub

In some ways, the term vendor-neutral archive (VNA) is like the label “all natural” on a jar of applesauce. It’s trendy, beckons to you from the shelf, and sure seems like a good thing—yet you’re not quite sure what the term really means since it is not actually defined.

My favorite VNA definition came from a guy at RSNA 2014. He told me that VNA means that when you migrate to a new PACS vendor you don’t have to pay the old vendor one dime. While it’s not the best VNA definition (albeit an amusing one), it does point to one of the driving forces behind the technology.

PACS migration from one system to another has traditionally been an expensive, time-consuming process. PACS vendors have little or no incentive to make an easy migration away from their products. One key objective of a VNA is to make PACS data migration less costly, less time-consuming, and actually happen less often. Customers like the concept that once imaging data are stored in the archive, they will be readily accessible through several generations and/or brands of PACS.

The second key VNA objective is to provide similar centralized access to all the other types of imaging and other medical data through one archive and interface. Organizations want to combine images from dermatology, ophthalmology, the various endoscopy applications, as well as EHR information. Handling those jobs—in a manner that complies with HIPAA and the other medical security and privacy requirements—drives organizations’ VNA efforts.

Veteran imaging IT expert Herman Oosterwijk, president of OTech Inc, offers this VNA definition in his white paper on the subject. It’s not as humorous as the one I heard at RSNA, but it is more useful:

“A Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) is a medical device that provides scalable image and information and life cycle management so that images and related information can be queried, stored, and retrieved in a manner that is defined by open standards at multiple department, enterprise, and regional level while maintaining patient privacy and security. Characteristic for a VNA is that it provides a patient-centric approach that transcends upgrades and changes of the different viewing, acquisition, and workflow management components as they should be interchangeable without having to migrate, convert, or change the data formats or interface of the VNA.”

While VNA architecture will likely expand with the consolidation in the health care and with clinicians’ growing demands for ready access to more information. VNAs certainly have not taken hold everywhere yet, but the idea has.