May 12, 2015 – Broward Health became the first hospital system in South Florida to deploy a vendor neutral archive (VNA) solution to manage patient-centric medical images. The integrated delivery network (IDN) selected Mach7 Technologies’ Enterprise Imaging Platform as its VNA partner.
A VNA is an enterprise repository of patient-centric medical images and is designed to reduce the complexity of integrations and interfaces across disparate picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) within the enterprise. Two standards define the industry: HL7 is the standard to transmit and receive clinical data and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard defines a set of formats, protocols and services used for the handling, storing and exchanging of medical images.
”Care delivery technology is an important part of our infrastructure’s architecture,” said Doris Peek, M.D., senior vice president/chief information officer at Broward Health. “Adhering to compliance and regulations largely impacts the mechanisms used to store, protect and access patient data. It is only through healthcare collaboration that we can offer quality patient care.”
Design architecture takes into consideration the implementation of deconstructed PACS – the future of patient imaging system. Deconstructed PACS environments will allow Broward Health to select cutting-edge technology products, such as universal viewers, diagnostic viewers for specialties and advanced visualization components for 3-D imaging.
“VNA has been gaining momentum in the medical imaging domain,” said James Orr, manager of PACS, SAN, and on-site support at Broward Health. “Technology for technology’s sake was not the principal driver in our evaluation process – we wanted a system that managed the entire lifecycle management aligned to our policies in a cost-effective way. Images had to be stored in their native format. Another critical consideration we had was that we should be able to replace a PACS or VNA system without much effort and expense. This makes sense as our ecosystem has legacy and state-of-the-art systems and data migration presents a formidable challenge.”
VNAs remove contractual obligations for PACS vendors, as data is vendor-agnostic and stored in native format. As a result, costly data migration can be avoided and brings value optimization for storage. In fact, deploying the VNA solution is estimated to save Broward Health approximately $2.8 million by 2022.
“This is the pathway for a unified method of delivering medical images for various clinical specialties,” said Boris Kalitenko, senior PACS administrator at Broward Health. “Deconstructed PACS architecture creates an ecosystem where a single universal viewer driven by VNA can deliver images in any format and structured data such as allergies, medication and lab results on a single screen. Clinicians can view and collaborate in real-time using variety of the HTML5 enabled devices. Patient data stays secured as no part of the data stored on any of the remote devices. All of these mechanisms help clinicians arrive at more accurate diagnoses and in turn leads to better clinical outcomes.”
For more information: www.browardhealth.org
March 12, 2026 
