A woman leading her team to a successful PACS VNA migration

What Is The Difference Between Advanced & Standard DICOM Migration?

  • Category Articles Medical Data Migration
  • Date Published Jul 10, 2023
  • Written by LAITEK Inc
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The healthcare industry is moving toward an analytic-driven world. Migrating data from a legacy PACS is a complex and time-consuming task because there are millions of electronic health records and medical imaging data. It requires an ecosystem of many tools and systems to work together to extract, translate, validate, and load data from the legacy system to your target one.

When you think about performing data migration, a standard migration will probably come to mind. But there is another option to consider, which is an advanced DICOM migration. You might not have heard about advanced DICOM migrations before, but are these two concepts very different…or more closely related than we think?

Let’s explore the differences between standard data migration and advanced DICOM data migration.

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What is data migration?

Data migration refers to the process of selecting, preparing, extracting, and transforming data to transfer it from one storage system to another. You typically perform data migration when you introduce a new system for the data.

 

There are three types of data migration:

  1. Storage migration moves data from an existing system into a more modern one. It allows for significantly faster performance and better data management. It also enables features like cloning and backups.

  2. Cloud migration moves data from an on-premise center to a cloud or from one cloud to another.

  3. Application migration moves an entire application program from one environment to another. You can move the program from an on-premises IT center to the cloud, from one cloud to another, or move the data to a new version of the application from a software provider.

What is advanced DICOM migration?

DICOM stands for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. It’s a widely known protocol for communicating and managing medical imaging information. It specifies the standard for data interchange, digital image format, and file structure for medical images. 

While it’s easy to get confused between data migration and DICOM migration, the concepts are not far apart. Hospitals and clinics perform standard DICOM migrations all the time to transfer medical imaging data, but there could be data and corrupted files during the process.

Advanced DICOM migration is a form of data migration unique to LAITEK. 

It ensures medical imaging data is migrated quickly, accurately, and securely. It completes complex PACS data migrations without interrupting existing medical workflows. Advanced DICOM migration also ensures the data is validated to ensure the migration is complete and the files are accurate.

Understanding DICOM migration

Medical imaging is essential for hospitals to provide quality patient care. As technology advances and there are better ways of storing and archiving image files, DICOM migration becomes a necessary process. 

Hospitals must perform advanced DICOM migration to preserve medical images and comply with strict healthcare regulations. This entails transferring medical images, while keeping the metadata and structure intact.

DICOM migrations can be very complex and costly, depending on the amount of data and systems involved. Not to mention, it requires specialized expertise to complete and ensure data is validated and tested. 

Many hospitals choose to perform an advanced DICOM migration from the legacy PACS to their target system to improve the performance of their data management and patient care.

The main difference between data migration and DICOM migration is that DICOM migration focuses only on medical imaging data—it converts data between different formats. On the other hand, standard data migration transfers all your data from one system to another. 

DICOM migration comes with a number of benefits, including increased efficiency in managing image data and better patient care.

Someone sits in their study, pouring over books. They take notes regarding the process of migrating PACS and DICOM data

Who uses advanced DICOM migration?

Many hospitals and diagnostic imaging device manufacturers or clinics that use diagnostic imaging devices use advanced DICOM migration to migrate critical medical imaging data from one system to another. This is often between a legacy PACS and a newer system currently in place.

Diagnostic imaging devices are vital in the early diagnosis of chronic illnesses. Doctors often perform X-rays, ultrasounds, CT scans, and molecular imaging. When there are millions of patients, migrating imaging data to a better, newer system ensures excellent patient care.


With the emergence of novel viruses and the innovation of new technology and standards, advanced DICOM migration is more important than ever to keep up with the increasingly complex needs of patient care.

Two people shake hands over a laptop. A rusted resource in knowing what a DICOM PACS migration is.

LAITEK migration services

To meet healthcare’s increasingly demanding and complex image migration needs, hospitals need a trusted partner capable of migrating data without clinical interruption.

Since 1980, LAITEK has been the industry leader in advanced DICOM migration. Not only did we write the book on DICOM migration, we also strive to improve as industry and standard leaders. We work directly with hospitals and as subcontractors for replacement PACS vendors.

Our signature approach to advanced data migration–MIGRATEK–provides the industry’s most complete imaging data migration. We are also up to five times faster than other providers in the industry. We help you move imaging data from your legacy PACS to your current one with unparalleled security and complete interoperability.

MIGRATEK transfers your imaging data in a replicate environment, ensuring data is transferred seamlessly into the background without interrupting clinical workflows. It also ensures minimal data loss and confirms all data to ensure each study has been successfully migrated with all the normalized information it should have. 

Our solutions help you archive unvalidated data, seamlessly route and view data in different formats, and convert and normalize data from any format. 

Talk to an expert today to learn how our customized solutions can help you.