BridgeHead Software, a leader in healthcare data management, today announced that it has been cited as a representative vendor in the "Gartner Market Guide for Vendor-Neutral Archives" by analyst Barry Runyon. The guide is written to help healthcare delivery organization (HDO) CIOs and medical imaging leaders better understand the Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) market, its future and its notable vendors.

From Gartner's perspective, the report states[1], "a VNA is an enterprise wide repository of patient-centric medical images and associated content. Vendor neutrality is achieved by interfacing with all major PACS vendors and by accommodating proprietary PACS and healthcare delivery organization (HDO) requirements for medical image storage, retrieval and viewing. The VNA value proposition centers on promoting medical imaging standards, increasing the control and ownership the HDO has over its medical images and associated data, mitigating data migration complexity, and decreasing its dependence on individual PACS vendors."

"We believe it is an honor for BridgeHead Software to be included as one of the vendors in the Gartner ‘Market Guide for Vendor-Neutral Archives'," said Tony Cotterill, chief products officer, BridgeHead Software. "As a health data management company, BridgeHead Software welcomes Gartner's finding that the VNA is a critical component of the real-time healthcare system (RTHS).' But, what is really interesting, is that the market is now acknowledging that the scope of a VNA now extends beyond the management of medical images alone. This is a welcomed opinion; it's clear to us at BridgeHead that organizations absolutely see the benefit of leveraging their VNA environments to manage patient data from across the healthcare enterprise."

In the last 18 months BridgeHead has successfully deployed its next generation VNA, HealthStoreTM, in more NHS Trusts than any other independent VNA vendor.

In August, BridgeHead announced North Middlesex University NHS Trust had selected HealthStoreTM, for the storage, protection and sharing of radiology images. Additionally, the Trust will be using HealthStore alongside its new Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) to build an enterprise-wide data repository to help ensure that patient information is available at the point of care delivery.

North Middlesex University NHS Trust follows on from successful next generation VNA deployments at Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust; Homerton University Hospital Trust and Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.