VNA Usage Trends and Medical Imaging Storage Needs

According to a recent report published by IHS, the compound annual growth of VNA storage worldwide from 2011 to 2017 is expected to be at 48%. With the benefits VNA has to offer such as data management, disaster recovery, communications and security, the expectation is to drive increased use of this technology and make it the preferred storage platform for medical imaging.

According to a recent report published by IHS, the compound annual growth of VNA storage worldwide from 2011 to 2017 is expected to be at 48%. With the benefits VNA has to offer such as data management, disaster recovery, communications and security, the expectation is to drive increased use of this technology and make it the preferred storage platform for medical imaging.

IHS recognized three main VNA delivery models: non-hosted, hosted, and hybrid. The report confirmed that non-hosted VNA models continue to dominate in the world market. However, the chart also shows that hosted VNAs are predicted to grow at the fastest rate out of the three. This should not come as a big surprise since cloud services continue to grow in the healthcare industry, and hosted storage space for medical images has grown threefold since 2005.

More interesting is the breakdown of these statistics by region. It is clear from each breakdown that hosted VNAs are going to be the biggest growth area, but some regions, such as EMEA, are predicted to slightly decrease in hybrid and non-hosted VNAs by 2017.

In the Americas, strong growth is predicted across all three business models, with hosted showing the second largest percentage of growth among the three regions.

The Asia Pacific region is predicted to have the largest hosted VNA growth of all the regions. More surprising is that non-hosted VNA adoption will continue to grow at a healthy rate through 2017. With adoption being so low in 2012, and strong progress made in 2013, it is clear that this region poised to be leader in VNA usage.

Healthcare providers around the world view on-site vendor-neutral archiving platforms as a reliable solution that simplifies data management and enables secure information sharing across multiple locations or users. In addition to helping equip clinicians with a comprehensive view of patient clinical information, cloud-based archiving can simplify and consolidate storage resources to reduce costs and enhance workflow by eliminating departmental silos of clinical information.

While we are proud at Carestream to be ranked as the third largest VNA supplier in the world, we recognize that there is still a long way to go when it comes to meeting the storage, protection, and access needs of our customers. We, and all VNA providers, certainly have our work cut out for us to meet these trends in an effective and efficient manner. It is a challenge and one we embrace and look forward to meeting.