From Trust to Use and Beyond Chapter Eight | Page 16

PIEDMONT: A CASE STUDY in
enterprise-storage-centric strategy.
PIEDMONT HEALTH SYSTEM
Piedmont, which has acquired a number of physician practices and has grown to include
seven hospitals and more than 100 locations, has embraced a centralized PACS, coupled with
a VNA, as its PACS integration strategy.
“With the majority of our acquisitions, we choose to migrate their data over, and to
standardize them on our enterprise Philips Xcelera platform,” says Steven W. Campbell, IS
manager, Diagnostic Applications and Interfaces, for Piedmont Health. “We also have a GE
PACS solution that we use in cardiology.”
“In deciding when to migrate the data from a newly acquired legacy PACS, Piedmont
considers both cost and timing. We look at the cost of that migration, the cost from a
resource perspective, and also in terms of educating the staff involved. The timing may be
wrong to replace a particular PACS,” Campbell adds. He doesn’t believe that the VNA offers
a lower-cost storage solution than the enterprise PACS. But he does believe that it reduces
the cost of data migration, in comparison to migrating the data directly from the legacy PACS
to the enterprise PACS.
“When we purchased the VNA, one of the major reasons was around the data migration.
There used to be a very high cost for each migration. When we did our VNA analysis, we
looked at the cost of onboarding eight practices a year and one hospital every two years. We
asked ourselves, ‘What was the cost of migration from leveraging the benefits of the VNA in
contrast to doing it ourselves and engaging the vendors,’ and there was a huge cost saving
from the VNA.”