How PTI Improved Medical Services for Veterans

The Standards and COTS Integrated Platform (SCIP) project is responsible for enhancing the current Veteran Affairs (VA) image sharing capability to include bidirectional connectivity within the Department of Defense (DOD) Enterprise Clinical Image Archive (ECIA).

This ultimately allows physicians to retrieve and view clinical images such as those from endoscopy, pathology, dermatology, cardiology, radiology, nuclear medicine images, and scanned clinical and administrative documents.

These captured images are combined with text data to facilitate a clinician’s task of correlating information and making timely and accurate patient care decisions.

The Enterprise Clinical Image Archive (ECIA) is DOD’s NextGen enterprise image sharing solution, and the SCIP project allows the VA solution to integrate with it. This allows physicians to retrieve and view clinical images across all VA and DOD facilities, ensuring patients can get their medical information no matter where they are. This was not previously possible.

The SCIP project has created the solution which unprecedently allows bidirectional connectivity between VistA Imaging and DOD’s ECIA and has expanded the capabilities of VistA Imaging to serve as a tool to aid consultation among physicians and communication between a physician and patient – whether in the same department, in different services, or at different sites.

Over 650 different models of DICOM image acquisition instruments send images to VistA.  A little over a billion images are acquired annually. The SCIP project is making it possible for the billions of clinical images stored in VistA to be retrieved by physicians at DOD facilities and vice versa which allows Veterans to receive the same care whether they are at a VA or DOD facility.

Persistent Technology, Inc. is proud to provide these services to Veteran Affairs and the Department of Defense. COTS Integration, System Interoperability, and Custom Application Development were all utilized to create a solution that ultimately eases and improves the lives of Veterans and their physicians.