A growing volume and variety of patient information created a big challenge for leaders at CHRISTUS Health. “We needed to make patient information readily available to clinicians while also managing it within a long-term storage solution outside the departmental picture archiving and communication system (PACS),” said Lynn Gibson, vice president and CTO at CHRISTUS.
CHRISTUS implemented the Perceptive Acuo VNA. “We wanted a truly independent solution,” said Gibson. “Other applications we reviewed had proprietary ties back to their own PACS. A PACS-neutral VNA is better able to cross boundaries between disparate systems. Perceptive also has the ability to handle content types beyond DICOM. Support for XDS and other standards will allow us to manage unstructured patient content not just from radiology but other clinical departments as well. This gives us a more flexible platform for managing future growth of data and allows us to participate in healthcare information exchanges (HIE).”
Using the VNA to tag and manage images in a more consistent manner, CHRISTUS hopes to make the delivery of unstructured content more complementary to core patient care systems including the electronic medical record (EMR), order management systems and a planned enterprise master patient index (EMPI). “In the past, getting information into an archive was extremely manual and very tedious,” continued Gibson. “The VNA has streamlined the lion’s share of this. It is the aggregation point where all medical images are brought together for a patient without having to go to each separate storage location.”
Case study supplied by Perceptive Software
May 21, 2025 
