The Vendor Neutral Archive & PACS market could be worth 3.48 billion by 2018!

DALLAS, October 8, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --




The "Vendor Neutral Archive Market & PACS Market - VNA [On-premise Software, Hybrid & Cloud, Multi-Department & Multi-Site VNA] & Picture Archiving and Communication System [Enterprise, Cardiology & Radiology] - Global Forecast to 2018" analyzes and studies the major market drivers, restraints, and opportunities in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World.

At present, the Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) And Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) Markets form indispensable segments of the imaging informatics market. The overall market (VNA and PACS) comprises of VNA software solutions as well as departmental and enterprise PACS. The global VNA Market is estimated at $165.3 million in 2013 and is poised to reach $335.4 million by 2018, at a CAGR of 15.2%. 

Departmental PACS currently dominates the overall Vendor Neutral ArchiveMarket and PACS Market with around 86.5% of the total revenue contribution. However, this market is a considerably mature market generating most of the revenues from PACS replacements. Hence, the market is expected to witness a stable CAGR of 5.2% from 2013 to 2018. Enterprise PACS, on the other hand, is growing faster than departmental PACS and is expected to reach $510 million by 2018, at an almost double CAGR. 



Owing to the growing popularity of VNA solutions, the VNA Market is currently in the growth phase of its product lifecycle. The market is characterized by several inter-firm partnerships to deliver best-of-breed solutions to healthcare providers. In addition, development of products that enable the integration of VNAs with EHRs and their subsequent launch in the market is a growing trend.



The major driving factors of the VNA Market include the need for centralized storage of standard-compliant imaging data, government initiatives that favor the use of advanced imaging information systems, technology and cost-related benefits. On the other hand, lack of an established definition of VNA resulting in confusion and data insecurity (breaches) is an issue that restricts market growth. Cloud-based VNAs, emerging markets, and patient-focused systems promise high-growth opportunities in the global VNA market.

In 2013, North America contributes the maximum share to both VNA and PACS markets, with shares of 64% and 48%, respectively. U.K., Germany, and France contribute largely to the European VNA and PACS Market, whereas the Asia-Pacific region represents the most promising region owing to the nation and state-wide healthcare IT policies in Australia, China, and Japan. Although the penetration of VNAs in the ROW region is low, the PACS technology is now widely adopted in Latin America and the Middle East. 



Key companies in the VNA and PACS Market include Acuo Technologies (U.S.), Agfa HealthCare (Belgium), BridgeHead Software (U.K.), Carestream Health (U.S.), Dell, Inc. (U.S.), GE Healthcare (U.K.), Fujifilm Corporation (Japan), Merge Health (U.S.), McKesson Corporation (U.S.), Philips Healthcare (The Netherlands), Siemens Healthcare (Germany), and TeraMedica (U.S.).

We’re proud to partner with Dell, Inc, GE Healthcare, Fujifilm Corporation, McKesson Corporation, Philips Healthcare and Siemens Healthcare for their PACS and Vendor Neutral Archive Solutions.

Glossary: Medical Imaging & Medical IT Terms

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Confused by all of the  Medical Imaging & Medical IT acronyms, terms and buzzwords? Here's a handy glossary to help translate!

Term	Description
ADT	HL7 Admit, Discharge, and Transfer message
AES	Advanced Encryption Standard is a block cipher adopted as an encryption standard by the U.S. government and announced by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001.
AN/API	DeJarnette’s DICOM toolkit. The xDLTM application is built using AN/API
API	Application Programming Interface – a source code interface used to support requests to be made by another program or application.
CILM	Clinical Information Lifecycle Management – a set of strategies for administering storage systems.
COM	Component Object Model – a platform introduced by Microsoft to enable inter-process communication and object creation in any programming language that supports the platform.
DICOM	Digital Imaging and COmmunications in Medicine - the DICOM Standard facilitates interoperability of medical imaging equipment.
DICOM Part 10	Part 10 of the DICOM Standard specifies Media Storage and a File Format for Media Interchange.
GUI	Graphical User Interface
HIPAA	Hospital Insurance Portability and Accountability Act – enacted by US Congress in 1996 that addresses the security and privacy of health data.
HL7	Health Level 7 - the HL7 standard facilitates the exchange, management, and integration of electronic healthcare information
HTTP	Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol – a method for transferring or conveying information on the Internet.
HTTPS	HTTP over an encrypted Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) transport mechanism that ensures reasonable protection from eavesdroppers and attacks.
IHE	Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise – IHE promotes the coordinated use of standards such as DICOM and HL7 to address specific clinical needs in support of optimal patient care.
IIS	Internet Information Services – a powerful web server from Microsoft that is included with the Windows Server 2003 OS.
ILM	Information Lifecycle Management – a set of strategies for administering storage systems.
LAN	Local Area Network – a computer network covering a local area such as an office or a group of buildings.
MD5	Message-Digest Algorithm 5 – a widely used cryptographic hash function
ORM	HL7 General Order message
ORU	HL7 Unsolicited Observation message
PACS	Picture Archiving and Communication System – a system for the storage, management and dissemination of digital medical images.
PNA	PACS Neutral Archive – see VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive)

RIS	Radiology Information System – a radiology scheduling, patient registration, procedure ordering, results reporting, and billing system.
SCP	Service Class Provider – a provider of a Service (in DICOM lexicon)
SCU	Service Class User – a user of a Service (in DICOM lexicon)
SOP	Service-Object Pair - an SOP class is the union of a Service and an information object. (in DICOM lexicon)
SQL	Structured Query Language – a popular computer language for creating, retrieving, updating and deleting data from relational databases.
TAR	Tape Archive file format, based on the original Unix archive command, used to collate collections of files into one larger file for archiving.
TCP/IP	Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol – a set of communication protocols used by the Internet and most commercial networks.
URL	Uniform Resource Locator – a location or address on the Internet.
VNA	Vendor Neutral Archive – medical image archive software that is agnostic to the PACS manufacturer and storage hardware vendor. See the White Paper “What is a Vendor Neutral Archive?”
xDLTM	Cross-enterprise (x) Document Library – DeJarnette Research Systems VNA which scales to archive projects of all sizes, from a simple modality archive to a regional or national image archive.
XDS-I	Cross-enterprise (X) Document Sharing for Imaging – IHE profile for sharing of documents and images across disparate healthcare enterprises.

Infographic: How America Transitions To Health IT

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In 2009, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, a part of the Recovery Act, created the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Records (EHR) Incentive Programs to promote the adoption of EHRs in support of the ultimate goals of improving the quality of patient care and reducing health costs. Through this program, eligible hospitals and doctors earn incentives by demonstrating “meaningful use” of certified technology, which means that health care providers use EHRs in ways that improve care and lower costs. Examples of “meaningful use” include electronic prescribing of medications and ensuring patients have access to their digital records.

 The following infographic created by the ONC illustrates the progress made in the nation’s transition to health IT since the passage of the HITECH Act in 2009.

Do you need help in transitioning your practice? Contact sales@dejarnette.com 

Since 1992, when DeJarnette released the first DICOM conformant developers toolkit (AN/API®) andACR-NEMA V2 IBM PC interface board (AT/ANSIF®), the company has been recognized as one of the most innovative developers of DICOM and HL-7 compliant PACS components.

Today we manufacture and distribute: 

1. a full-featured PACS migration toolkit designed to provide a complete set of legacy migration tools.
2. a standards based archive gateway that provides image and report sharing in the absence of XDS-I
3. a configurable, rules-based, advanced routing application
4. a CT workflow engine that offers the only automated solution for breaking up CT studies into constituent orders
5. a PACS-HIS-RIS integration engine with 15 years of technology evolution

PACSWare Solution

PACSware® is DeJarnette's family of software only clinical applications and development tools. All PACSware family members run under Microsoft Windows. A number of PACSware products also support SUN Solaris, Linux and other UNIX operating systems....MORE

OEM Tools

DeJarnette provides a number of tools for application developers and OEMs....MORE

Services

DeJarnette provides a number of services for medical imaging equipment & PACS vendors and PACS end-users... 

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Journal of Medical Imaging will launch in 2014

September 17th, 2013 http://dejarnette.com

12 September 2013 – In early 2014, SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, will launch the Journal of Medical Imaging (JMI), covering fundamental and translational research and applications focused on photonics in medical imaging.

The scope of JMI initially will mirror that of the annual SPIE Medical Imaging symposium. Topics will include imaging physics, tomographic reconstruction algorithms (such as those in CT and MRI), image processing, computer-aided diagnosis, visualization and modeling, image perception and observer performance, technology assessment, ultrasonic imaging, image-guided procedures and digital pathology.

"The new journal gives the field of medical imaging, which continues to be more and more interdisciplinary, a home for scientific presentation, discussion, review and archiving," said Dr. Maryellen Giger, A.N. Pritzker Professor of Radiology/Medical Physics at the University of Chicago, who has been appointed editor-in-chief.

Authors are invited to submit articles beginning 1 October 2013, with publication to begin in early 2014. More information is at http://www.spie.org/JMI.

JMI will be published in print quarterly and online in the SPIE Digital Library as each peer-reviewed article is approved for publication, with the online version freely available to all readers in the first year.

"The medical imaging community has a long association with SPIE through the annual symposium the Society has hosted for more than 40 years," noted SPIE President Bill Arnold. "Applications of these technologies have helped save lives through better diagnosis and less invasive treatments, and the field keeps expanding to meet more needs. Supporting the community with a home journal is a significant step forward."

"SPIE is delighted to be able to respond to the needs expressed by the medical imaging community, in particular authors who currently participate in the Medical Imaging symposium. The new journal will provide them a rigorous, peer-reviewed option for their work and help maintain and foster the already well-established connections within the community," said SPIE Publications Director Eric Pepper.

Because it is open to submissions internationally, JMI will also serve to strengthen connections and facilitate collaboration among researchers in academia, medical institutions, industry, and government labs throughout the larger imaging community, Giger said.

Provided by SPIE—International Society for Optics and Photonics

Archiving of non-DICOM data with xDLT

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A frequently asked customer question is, “how does xDL handle non-DICOM data?” The answer is both simple and complex. The simple answer is that xDL will handle any non-DICOM data from the perspective of an archive.

Non-DICOM data is any medical data that can be considered part of the electronic medical record. There are two problems with this type of data, how it is transported across a network and how the data is associated with information already existing in the archive so that it can be accessed and used logically.
There is no general purpose standard for communicating and requesting the storage and retrieval of medical documents other than XDS, which is not widely used today. As a consequence, the approach taken with xDL is to offer a number of options for the interface of such data producers and consumers. There are currently large numbers of systems in the field which provide for scanned documents encapsulated in a DICOM object. Similarly a common mechanism amongst hospital IT departments is to use HL7 to communicate “documents” that are outside the normal workflow. Both of these mechanisms require agreement between the different vendors providing systems to the customer as they are non-standard usages, generally. The xDL allows the use of all three of these transport methodologies XDS, HL7 and DICOM to provide the most compatibility with today’s existing equipment.

The use of the transports mandates data that allows the archive to associate the medical data with existing data within the archive. Patient level data is the minimum required by the archive to associate data and this is the minimum provided by all of the aforementioned transports. It should be noted that simple file transport methodologies such as CIFS or NFS do provide a common transport methodology but they do not allow any metadata to be associated with the storage. This is acceptable for a simple archive but not acceptable for an archive that is designed to associate like data together.

Non-DICOM data can be presented to the xDL for storage as a DICOM encapsulated document, a document presented within an HL7 message or an XDS document. Non-DICOM data today can be retrieved as a DICOM encapsulated document, a document within an HL7 message or as an XDS document. All non-DICOM data, unless it is presented as an XDS document, is stored as a DICOM object. Sufficient context information must be supplied via DICOM or HL7, to associate the document with a patient. XDS is guaranteed to provide sufficient context information.

As an XDS Repository any XDS document can be stored to and retrieved from xDL. The xDL does not need to interpret or “understand” this data in order to store it. Today, there are few devices that support the XDS profile, but that list will grow in the future. If the XDS document is a DICOM document then it is also possible to retrieve it via DICOM or HL7, to the extent that retrieval makes sense.

xDL also has the ability to store and retrieve non-DICOM data that is included as part of an HL7 message. For instance it is possible to store PDF, JPEG, TIFF and other image types in the xDL via HL7. This is a particularly flexible method to store non-DICOM data as the core of the company’s HL7 messaging technology is the ERI. ERI (external record interface) is a general purposes message parsing and generation facility that is driven by a customization file. The customization file allows for customization through “scripting”. The ERI is built upon the company’s 20+ years of experience in providing HL7 interfaces to the medical imaging world. It is possible to not only perform text data manipulation but also image format conversion.1

Through “scripting”2, data manipulation and format conversion can occur either on the way into xDL or the way out of xDL.
Table 1 below shows the various combinations of how non-DICOM data can be acquired, stored and retrieved.
Table 1
Today, most non-DICOM document interfaces are achieved through the described methods. It is envisioned that improved workflow and data quality can be achieved by more tightly coupling the xDL to non-DICOM data producers. For this reason, the company is to bring to market a general purpose non-DICOM Document Acquisition/QC station. The company has in the past developed and marketed acquisition stations for acquiring non-DICOM images and conversion to DICOM or other imaging standards.

Storage Method	Storage Format	Retrieval Method
		DICOM	HL73	XDS	WADO
DICOM Encapsulation	DICOM	Y	Y	Y	Y
XDS DICOM Document	DICOM	Y	Y	Y	Y
XDS non-DICOM Document	XDS	N	N	Y	N
HL74	DICOM	Y	Y	Y	Y

1 As xDL projects are deployed, the number and type of “off the shelf” data conversions increases. The development of these conversions is driven entirely by sales. Development and deployment of these conversion scripts are generally quick and safe, with regards to effect on the rest of the xDL system.
2 Perl is the primary scripting language used by the ERI. 3 Data manipulation is available at time of retrieval.
4 Data manipulation is available at time of storage.