OCINET
“ One of the things that the industry realised ,” Shamji explains , “ is that if we ’ re centralising imaging and the availability of images through repositories , that ’ s pretty closely related to what a hospital does on a regular basis with their PACS , the picture archiving and communication system to read those images .
“ And the same value statement could be made in that not everyone should be investing heavily in these very large enterprise systems .”
OCINet ’ s collaboration with GE HealthCare OCINet has a long-standing relationship with GE HealthCare . “ GE HealthCare has been a very strong collaborator for a long time , and they understand the market extremely well , specifically the Ontario market and how that system works ,” Shamji describes . “ They understand the idiosyncrasies around funding , around capabilities , around integration , around the non-for-profit healthcare system that we run in Ontario . And that makes a difference because anybody who doesn ’ t understand it will try and implement something that won ’ t work because it ’ s very different from the US-based for-profit healthcare system .”
“ The collaboration with Ge Healthcare goes all the way back to when we started building the DIRs in 2005 ,” Veeneman comments . “ What ’ s unique about Ge HealthCare ) is the commitment to the DIRs , and to the province of Ontario in particular . A lot of people think of the DIRs as vendor neutral archives ( VNAs ), and that is certainly a core component of the DIR . But the DIR in itself is not an off-the-shelf product . It ’ s made of multiple technology stacks because we ’ re not just archiving data , we ’ re distributing that data , and we ’ re providing an image view into that data .
“ Success is directly tied to the collaboration that we get from our vendors . And there have been a lot of strong vendor collaborations along the way , but I would say none are as strong , as long or as big as our work with GE HealthCare .”
As Veeneman explains , GE HealthCare ’ s Edison Datalogue has enabled OCINet to integrate the imaging archives from 18 different PACS vendors , in what has been a major accomplishment . ocinet . ca 13