Healthcare organizations and IT partners benefit from broader support for XDS-i and overall VNA performance improvements

WOBURN, MA and ASHTEAD, UK – August 14, 2013 – BridgeHead Software, a leader in healthcare data management, today announced enhancements to its Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) solution for healthcare organizations. BridgeHead’s enhancements improve the way it handles DICOM images as part of its enterprise archive solution, providing hospitals and partners with broader support for Cross-enterprise Document Sharing for Imaging (XDS-i). XDS-i publishes images to an XDS repository that facilitates the sharing of those images inside a hospital and across a group of care sites.

New features in DICOM handling found in BridgeHead’s VNA solution include:
•         Improved Support for XDS-i – to publish images to an XDS interoperability framework and aid the retrieval of those imaging documents across a group of affiliated enterprises, using WADO (web access for DICOM objects);
•         Performance improvements – especially with regards to C-Move capabilities;
•         Fully cluster aware – the BridgeHead VNA can now be installed in a Windows cluster.

“Laurel Bridge performed a thorough evaluation of BridgeHead’s VNA solution, and we are comfortable endorsing this product,” said Bronson R. Hokuf, Vice President, Laurel Bridge Software, a leading provider of Imaging Workflow Solutions to the medical imaging industry. “BridgeHead’s VNA solution proved to be very well-designed and functionally-sound; it will provide hospitals an advanced storage platform for managing all of their medical images, alongside other healthcare data, in one secure, centralized, easy-to-operate archive solution.”

As part of the BridgeHead HDM Solution, BridgeHead’s VNA offering enables hospitals to efficiently manage all of their image data within one environment. BridgeHead Software’s HDM not only offers a VNA for DICOM images, but also a compatible archive for non-DICOM files, featuring a rich policy engine used for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), and controlling features like encryption and compression. BridgeHead Software’s HDM also offers comprehensive protection of all manner of data found within healthcare environments, from medical images, scanned patient documents, and patient notes, through to email, PDFs and many other file types.

“The BridgeHead approach to VNA is standards-based and incorporates DICOM, HL7 and XDS-i in order to ensure data availability across hospital applications while delivering easy media and application migrations, a full audit trail, and publically described schema,” said Jim Beagle, CEO of BridgeHead Software. “I am delighted that Laurel Bridge has endorsed our VNA for their customers and partners. Their services for migration of PACS DICOM images are complementary to BridgeHead’s VNA software, and we expect hospitals to benefit from this combination of capabilities.”