Philips and Hitachi Partner on Next-Generation Medical Image Management Solution

Royal Philips has announced a collaboration with Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., to deliver a highly scalable, high-performance Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) solution. A VNA is a universal data management solution in which medical images, documents and potentially other clinically relevant data are archived in a standard format, allowing them to be rapidly accessed in a vendor neutral manner by other informatics systems. The collaboration combines Philips’ expertise in enterprise medical image management solutions with Hitachi’s digital health data management capabilities.

Philips plans to launch the solution in the second half of 2016, further complementing the company’s portfolio of Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) and image analysis solutions.

This advanced VNA addresses the biggest challenges healthcare organizations face in making their many millions of images, often stored in multivendor systems and infrastructures from various departments, rapidly available to virtually any clinician at any location within the health system. In less than three seconds, clinicians can access relevant multi-discipline medical imaging information in order to obtain a more complete and integrated view of an individual patient’s medical condition over time, with the aim of improving patient outcomes.

“Conventional VNA solutions have struggled to satisfy the performance and scalability requirements of large healthcare enterprises. Together with Hitachi, we have been working on the development of a robust and secure solution that will integrate the entire medical imaging portfolio in one universal data management platform that is highly scalable, standards based and delivers the performance our customers need,” said Yair Briman, senior vice president and general manager of Healthcare IT, Philips. “We know from conversations with our customers that such a solution is needed to support healthcare enterprises in their efforts to deliver better patient care at lower cost.”

With rapid advancements in medical imaging, and its increased use in the diagnosis and treatment of disease, healthcare organizations face challenges with storing and retrieving imaging data in ever-increasing volumes, varieties, and file sizes. Many of Philips’ premier health system customers are generating more than 2 million medical images per week. These images range from X-ray, computed tomography and magnetic resonance scans made by their radiology, cardiology and oncology departments to the digital photos taken by dermatology and plastic surgery as part of a consultation. A single radiology or cardiology scan, for example, can easily generate several hundred megabytes of data. An even greater data explosion is on the horizon as digital pathology and genomics data storage become more widely adopted. However, today’s images are often still held in decentralized systems unable to connect — for example, separate radiology, cardiology and dermatology databases.  

There is a growing need for an enterprise-wide solution that offers high-speed universal access to imaging data for the different clinical settings that can help contain costs, avoid repeat exams, and improve patient outcomes. For chief information officers (CIOs) at healthcare enterprises looking to implement more effective data management strategies with centralized access using VNAs, high-speed on-demand delivery of large medical images to the clinicians who need them remains a challenge.

The Philips data management solution will leverage Philips’ ability to manage more than 135 billion medical images and is enabled by its HealthSuite digital-platform, an open hybrid on-premise and cloud-based platform that allows the creation of the next generation of connected health and clinical IT innovations. It will deliver high-speed performance for the universal hospital-wide management of medical images, while also adhering to the standards-based interoperability needed by institutions to leverage existing investments. Combined with Hitachi Data Systems’ experience in information protection, consolidation, archiving and searching, the result is a highly scalable and flexible solution that can cope with vastly growing amounts of data without compromising performance or speed of response. It is designed to be future-proof with the aim to integrate and store data coming from other sources such as EMRs, patient monitoring systems, and emerging technologies such as digital pathology and genomics.

“The ability to provide anytime, anywhere access to medical imaging and digital health records across the enterprise is an enormous opportunity for healthcare providers in their unending quest for better outcomes and higher quality of care,” said William A. Burns, vice president, Global Health and Life Sciences, Hitachi Data Systems. “Together with Philips, we are committed to addressing the need for integrated and homogeneous universal clinical data management and orchestration to give clinicians the access and data insights to achieve this goal.”