October 29, 2015 — Lexmark announced that North Carolina-based UNC Health Care System (UNC HCS) will deploy the Lexmark Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA), NilRead Enterprise Viewer and PACS Scan Mobile solutions at all of its locations. The trio of solutions will help meet diverse image and content management needs, including clinician workflow requirements and integration with the organization’s core patient electronic medical record (EMR) system. UNC HCS produces approximately 1.3 million DICOM studies annually.
A consolidated, VNA-based medical image repository and integrated common enterprise viewing solution will support the UNC HCS vision of “one patient, one chart, one image repository.” The goal is unifying all medical images and content for access from within the EMR and providing clinicians with faster, easier access to images for improved patient care decision-making.
In addition to serving as a single enterprise repository layer for tiered storage and long-term retention of all medical images, Lexmark VNA will function as UNC HCS’s primary imaging workflow engine and life cycle management solution. Lexmark VNA will be the source of medical images and content for Lexmark NilRead, a Web-based image viewing solution for UNC HCS physicians.
The Lexmark NilRead Viewer is expected to help UNC HCS referring physicians and diagnosticians work together more effectively to treat patients without the constraints of service line or facility silos, accessing and interacting with images and reports for all patient images in a single view. The zero-footprint design of NilRead enables large files to be delivered from the Lexmark VNA to local clinician workstations without download wait times.
Visible light images, captured by UNC HCS medical devices and smartphones with the aid of Lexmark’s PACS Scan Mobile solution, will be archived and managed by the Lexmark VNA using the Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) interoperability specification. PACS Scan Mobile leverages the mobile devices healthcare organizations are already using to route content into core systems.
The initial implementation services will include migration of 5.4 million existing medical studies with another 6 million studies to be migrated by the UNC HCS team. These images are currently held in multiple radiology and cardiology picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) across UNC HCS facilities.
Deployed via an on-premise, cloud or hybrid model, Lexmark VNA is an intelligent storage layer that manages information across departments and healthcare organizations. Using open standards and scalable storage technology, it provides interoperability and “liquidity” of healthcare content, including secure access to documents, medical images and other patient-related information from within a patient’s “healthcare jacket.” Lexmark VNA is federated, HDO-owned and centrally managed.
“A large portion of medical images and other relevant content at UNC Health Care resides outside of our EMR system,” said Vineeta Khemani, executive director, clinical systems and enterprise architecture, UNC Health Care System. “The Lexmark VNA, NilRead Viewer and PACS Scan solutions will be part of our enterprise strategy to provide greater interoperability of patient content and extend our ‘One Patient, One Chart’ EMR vision to also include ‘One Image Repository.’ Our goal is to make sure physicians have all the information they need at the point of care without navigating through multiple systems to find it. The Lexmark healthcare content management approach gives us flexibility for the future.”
For more information: www.lexmark.com
April 16, 2024 
