Practice Management

Advocate Health Care, Oak Brook, Ill, has selected the Acuo Universal Clinical Platform (UCP), Minneapolis, as the company's new enterprise-wide vendor neutral archive (VNA) solution. UCP will replace Advocate's existing PACS archives while providing an enterprise foundation for future on-premise and cloud-based clinical content management.

Advocate health care facilities produce an average of 50 terabytes of new imaging data each year. Advocate's decision to implement an enterprise image archive emerged as a recommendation from a planned review of its various departmental archives. The review process revealed that a number of departmental PACS implementations were starting to have performance issues and were nearing the end of useful life.

This review, coupled with Advocate's belief that a single image repository was needed to address future patient care requirements and growth, prompted project leaders to look for a better data storage and management solution. "Our review process included the scoring of a formal RFI, vendor presentations, Q&A follow-up, and in-depth, technical, and workflow sessions with the five most experienced vendors in the VNA space," said an Advocate spokesperson.

Advocate decided to contact Acuo Technologies for a pilot implementation to determine if the vendor neutral archive within Acuo's Universal Clinical Platform application would meet Advocate's clinical and financial requirements. The pilot resulted in a year-long evaluation process. Based on the success of the pilot program, IT leaders at Advocate, recommended expanding the VNA across the enterprise, making it the central archive for all imaging content management.

Going forward, Advocate plans to connect all new and existing imaging systems, including radiology, cardiology, oncology, endoscopy, and others, to the Acuo platform.