Use this checklist of essential attributes, qualifications and functionality when planning implementation of a VNA product and selecting a technology partner. Shortcomings in any of these areas can produce less than desirable results for your project:

1. Experience in Implementation of VNA Solutions – Look for an organization with at least ten years of experience archiving and migrating studies in a vendor neutral format.
2. Data Migration Engine – Make sure the product you are evaluating includes built-in software for use in future migrations and that during migration it allows access to prior studies in the legacy archive (federation) as the new system is coming online.
3. Dynamic DICOM Tag Morphing – Confirm that the product will perform on-the-fly conversion/ mapping of data elements in a DICOM header in support of data exchange between PACS and that it utilizes a “self-learning” library of DICOM conformance.
4. Future Proof XDS-I Manifest – Look for automated creation and publishing to an XDS Repository of XDS-I manifests for all data objects ever ingested by the VNA when needed.
5. Intelligent Clinical Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Methodology – Your chosen solution should facilitate data movement and retention, both internal and external to the system based on clinical metadata associated with the study (study date, study type, patient age, etc.) Make sure the solution will provide a separate ILM strategy for each organizational node/DB (facility, department). Look for automated, user-defined data purge.
6. Pre-fetching / Auto-Routing (Point to Multi-Point) – Make sure the system will perform HL-7 or DMWL enabled pre-fetching of relevant prior data being managed by the VNA and auto-routing of that data to the appropriate department PACS, either directly or through the local VNA facility cache.
7. Support for DICOM and Non-DICOM Content – The solution should offer full conformance with latest DICOM SOP classes (SCU and SCP). Non-DICOM - Methodology or accepting and managing non-DICOM data objects, most notably J-PEG and PDF objects, preferably via Web services.
8. Flexible Architecture – Make sure the system is truly server and storage hardware agnostic, has primary and secondary mirrored subsystems, and provides for active-active or active-passive modes with automated failover and automated reconciliation between multiple subsystems. Check for the ability to support VMWare and virtual IP configurations.
9. Data Integrity – The system should perform synchronized updating of metadata (patient/study level changes) through a journalized approach within the actual image data. Make sure it allows for automated disaster recovery should the database become unavailable as the database and image con-tent remain in sync. The journal can be used as a historical audit of when, what, and how metadata content was changed.
10. Historical – When using standards for ingesting and storing, the PACS or VNA vendor should never have required a migration of the archived study data in their system due to a software upgrade, new platform or storage media.
11. RIS – The VNA should propogate updates received from RIS(s) or via manual update, to all destinations that received studies in order for all available patient information to stay in sync.
12. PACS Aggregation and Federation – The VNA should be able to aggregate query results from multiple disparate PACS or locations.