Advocate Health Care Selects Acuo Technologies VNA For Enterprise Image Archive

Universal Clinical Platform to Provide Vendor Neutral Architecture for PACS Data Migration, Clinical Content Management and Life Cycle Management

Bloomington, MN /PRNewswire/ -- Acuo Technologies®, the world leader in high-performance software and services for clinical content management and data migration, announced today that Advocate Health Care has selected the Acuo Universal Clinical Platform (UCP) 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 healthcare 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.

"Our review looked at the number and size of various image repositories within Advocate, said Greg Pilat, system director of imaging/radiology for Advocate. "We knew that eventually we would need to do a better job of managing our imaging data to facilitate greater, more efficient access to clinical image data by clinicians and other caregivers. Aside from making our image data more readily available, we ultimately wanted to aggregate our image volume in an effort to drive down storage and life cycle management costs, have more control over our own data and address a number of data migration issues."

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 Pilat. 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, Pilat and Tuan Bui, PACS Program Manager for Advocate, recommended expanding the VNA across the enterprise, making it the central archive for all imaging content management.

"This project is critical to Advocate's ability to effectively deliver information to caregivers across our system and provide better care for our patients," said Bui. "We selected Acuo based on their longevity in the medical imaging industry. They have an extensive list of healthcare clients and data migration experience that spans every major PACS vendor and storage solution provider in the marketplace."

The Universal Clinical Platform solution is deployed in Advocate's Chicago data center, providing storage abstraction and clinical data integration services for Advocate medical imaging data stored within the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network^TM. This architectural model will enable Pilat's team to maximize control over clinical content while reducing storage costs through usage-based pricing. 

Going forward, Advocate plans to connect all new and existing imaging systems, including radiology, cardiology, oncology, endoscopy and others, to the Acuo platform. Acuo will work closely with the Advocate clinical and IT teams to provide guidance on a variety of projects to improve image management. Acuo will offer data migration expertise as Advocate begins preparing clinical content held in various departmental systems for migration to the Acuo enterprise image archive.  

"We have high expectations for the Acuo solution," said Pilat. "Our primary goal is to consolidate all imaging data for better access by care managers. We also want to reduce costs associated with archiving and sharing data between systems, improve image life cycle management, provide business continuity, data security and redundancy and, above all, maintain safety for our patients. During the Acuo implementation, we plan to establish procedures for ingesting new clinical services into the Advocate system and put new controls in place for managing all clinical content."  

"We're pleased to be working with one of the top-performing health care delivery systems in the country," said Jeff Timbrook, CEO of Acuo Technologies. "We developed the Universal Clinical Platform for organizations like Advocate that need to unlock the value of their data, extracting those files from their departmental silos to make them more readily available across the enterprise and giving medical personnel the information they need to make life-saving decisions."    

About Advocate Health Care

Advocate Health Care, named among the nation's top health systems, is the largest health system in Illinois and one of the largest health care providers in the Midwest. Advocate operates more than 250 sites of care, including 10 acute care hospitals, two integrated children's hospitals, five Level I trauma centers (the state's highest designation in trauma care),two Level II trauma centers, one of the area's largest home health care companies and one of the region's largest medical groups. Advocate Health Care trains more primary care physicians and residents at its four teaching hospitals than any other health system in the state. As a not-for-profit, mission-based health system affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the United Church of Christ, Advocate contributed $571 million in charitable care and services to communities across Chicagoland and Central Illinois in 2011.

About Acuo Technologies

Acuo Technologies, with headquarters in Minneapolis, MN, was founded in 2000 with the objective of developing the first enterprise-wide collaborative Universal Clinical Platform (UCP) solution for medical image content, both DICOM and Non-DICOM. Today, Acuo supports implementations of UCP around the world, including locations in Africa, Australia, Europe, North America and South America. For more information on providing superior clinical content management and data migration while simplifying operations and reducing costs, visit www.acuotech.com.

DICOM is the registered trademark of the National Electrical Manufacturers Association for its standards publications relating to digital communications of medical information.