November 19, 2012 — Acuo Technologies said the Defense Logistics Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) selected the Acuo Universal Clinical Platform (UCP) as a new vendor neutral archive (VNA) solution for enterprise patient imaging logistics. UCP will consolidate imaging studies from 39 U.S. Army picture archiving and communication system (PACS) sites and 23 U.S. Navy PACS sites located at military healthcare facilities throughout the world.
The nine-year contract, worth approximately $40 million, comprises products and services from Brit Systems, Dell Computer Systems and Acuo. Under the DINPACS III contract award, Brit Systems will provide contract and project management and Dell will furnish storage hardware installation and support, with Acuo's Universal Clinical Platform providing VNA software, HL-7 integration and migration services for more than 25 million patient imaging studies.
"The Acuo team is excited to play a key role in the health and healing of those who defend our freedom," said Jeff Timbrook, CEO for Acuo Technologies. "With a highly mobile population that literally spans the globe, delivering patient information to the right place at the right time has been a logistical challenge for Army and Navy physicians. Acuo's Universal Clinical Platform will enable the Department of Defense to finally achieve its goal of having all clinical content available to every military physician, anytime, anywhere. Ultimately, this deployment means higher quality, more responsive care for the military Warfighter, Wounded Warriors and their families around the world."
The Army and Navy joined forces on this project to solve a large digital logistics problem, including consolidation of medical imaging information held at many different military healthcare facilities around the world. Acuo will begin immediately installing its UCP software at these locations and performing data migration services that will continue over several years. The goal is to provide immediate access to Warfighter medical imaging information, regardless of deployment location. UCP is also expected to be an integral component of the DoD iEHR solution to provide service-oriented access to medical imaging informatics from any requesting application.
The Acuo clinical content management solution will consolidate patient imaging studies from Army and Navy PACS sites into a federated system where each local archive has awareness of all images in each of the other imaging archives. Each regional system will replicate to a set of centralized archives that will also be the connection points to the DoD electronic health record (EHR) for diagnostic radiology and dental images. The Army and Navy, who traditionally have procured their own separate PACS, will be sharing data centers to allow for image sharing, business continuance and disaster recovery for both branches of the military.
Acuo's UCP implementation efforts will begin immediately and continue into 2013, with migration efforts expected to continue over the next several years.
For more information: www.brit.com, www.dell.com and www.acuotech.com