34 PART I Healthcare Content Management: The Holistic View on Medical Data
However, VNAs also have one major weakness: they are generic. In this case this
means that they generally do not offer any functionalities or applications in order
to use the data in a meaningful way; for example, a multi-format viewer. In some
cases they are so generic that they are not even optimized for their actual purpose.
If, for example, not only medical data but also billing or email data, etc., are
archived in the system, the benefit of the »one-system-fits-all« approach for the
user will be limited due to a data overload.
If a VNA is already available in an institution that is thinking about the implementation
of an HCM, this VNA can cover the partial part of archiving within the
whole HCM structure. Within the HCM context, however, a VNA has no additional
advantages compared to other archiving solutions. Which is why there is
no reason to acquire such a system separately.
Clinical Document Management System (DMS)
The name says it all. The DMS is designed to manage documents. It performs this
task well and throughout the entire lifecycle of a document, from its creation and
release to archiving and document control. But when it comes to images or signal
data, the DMS often has to pass. The scope of functionality is too limited to
handle that kind of data sensibly.
In the context of an HCM strategy, the DMS does not offer any significant advantages.
This is because it only sets in after a document has been created. Naturally,
if a DMS is available, it can still be used for the entire process up to the release
of a document. However, the released medical documents should still flow into
an HCM system. From here they can be spread company-wide or cross-institutional,
be displayed on a multi-format viewer, and archived. For administrative
documents, of course, everything remains the same.
If no DMS is in use in your institution, the HIS can take over the creation and
control of the documents while the HCM system takes care of the rest.
Universal Viewer
In this section we’d like to take the time to have a closer look at the difference
between
a »universal viewer« and a »multi-format viewer«. Universal viewers can
display all images, regardless of format and archive. They even use middleware
that allows data from applicable image archives to be integrated so that the data
can be retrieved more efficiently.
Therefore universal viewers fulfill an important aspect of the HCM strategy, but
as a component of an HCM system they are only partially useful. This is because