Icon for NavigatorImaging Retrieval Workflow Manager

Navigator ensures relevant historical medical imaging studies and reports are made available to the radiologist for image comparison purposes and for providing greater clinical context, thereby enhancing the diagnostic process.

Common use cases include:

  • Automate and prioritize retrieval of relevant prior studies, based upon user-defined criteria, even when the desired information resides on disparate clinical or enterprise imaging archives or VNAs.
  • Handle new, walk-in, or unscheduled imaging studies or reports. When these scheduling events occur, Navigator can be triggered by the Compass image router to ensure that the relevant prior imaging studies are retrieved and made available to the radiologist, even when they reside on multiple, disparate PACS archives or VNA systems.
  • Include retrieved historical study information as part of an archive migration-on-demand process, whereby the pre-fetching process also consolidates DICOM and non-DICOM imaging information on a VNA or another centralized archive system.

Enterprise Imaging Capabilities

As the need to access historical medical information increases across the healthcare enterprise, we strive to help our customers meet their evolving enterprise imaging needs. By leveraging the workflow capabilities of our full product line, the distributed organizations that result from mergers and acquisitions can more easily solve their unique imaging integration challenges.

Our capabilities enable healthcare providers to easily implement and manage a scalable workflow layer that enhances interoperability between multiple PACS, VNA, and clinical IT environments.

Other Benefits that Navigator Enables

  • Support the demands of unscheduled ED, stroke, and trauma imaging, as well as long-lead-time, pre-scheduled imaging studies (such as breast, lung, and oncology follow-up) by prioritizing and scheduling retrieval of historical imaging studies.
  • Retrieve historical clinical reports or other related files associated with the historical DICOM imaging studies.
  • Schedule prefetching when no RIS or other ordering or scheduling system is available.
  • Support complex imaging scenarios, such as when a patient might have multiple exams scheduled for the same day.
  • Simplify monitoring of workflow and system activity across multiple facilities.
Navigator automates the retrieval and movement of existing DICOM and non-DICOM information stored on any archive used across a hospital or healthcare system. This includes looking across the healthcare organization to query multiple archives simultaneously.

Enterprise functionality meets the needs of the largest integrated health systems.

The emergence of integrated health systems and clinical integrated networks continues to increase imaging service line complexity even as imaging is used in a wider range of care areas. Such organizations require a powerful and flexible clinical IT infrastructure that supports their continually evolving requirements for image access and availability.

Increasingly, a patient’s historical imaging studies and reports reside in multiple, disparate locations, using different data identification schemes. Navigator has the intelligence to automate even the most complex priors fetching scenarios that are typical of large, integrated health systems. Navigator works in concert with our Compass Routing Workflow Manager to manage and coordinate a range of enterprise image ingestion and workflow needs.

Modality Priors Workflow Diagram

Imagine the impact on your workflow if you could:

  • Retrieve an HL7 object (report) while retrieving its associated DICOM imaging study.
  • Prioritize image fetching rules with user defined criteria.
  • Leverage site-specific pre-fetch workflow criteria to meet an organization’s unique clinical and operational priorities, such as:
    • Status (e.g., STAT, Walk-in)
    • Department (e.g., ED, ICU, Stroke)
    • Study or procedure type (e.g., Trauma, Stroke)
    • Date of next scheduled exam
    • Location (e.g., originating site or destination)
    • Modality
    • Time-of-day
  • Trigger the retrieval of historical priors from a batch import list of scheduled patients, in addition to the triggers available for HL7, web calls, or DICOM MWL.

Navigator runs on dedicated hardware or a virtual machine.

The latest release is Version 3.1.2.

Recommended System Specification

  • Intel i5, 16 GB RAM, 500 GB HD or better
  • Windows 10 or newer; Windows Server 2012 R2 or newer
  • May run on a virtual machine

System Software Prerequisites

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2012/14/16 x64 or newer
  • SQL Management Studio for SQL Server 2012 Express or SQL Server 2012 or newer
  • A recent web browser – suggested: Google Chrome (IE is not supported)

High-Availability Prerequisites

Standard Windows Failover Cluster – Minimal configuration:

  • Windows Server 2012 R2 or newer
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2012 x64 or newer
  • SQL Management Studio for SQL Server 2012 x64 or newer

Navigator Clients

What Clients are Saying

"Our very busy breast imaging program requires interpretation of images from multiple systems quickly and reliably, but we struggled with disparate medical record numbers and wasted radiologist time fetching previous studies at the time of interpretation. Compass and Navigator solved this problem for us."
Helen S. Sandven, MDMedical Dir. of Breast Imaging, Asheville Radiology Associates
"Our investments in Laurel Bridge workflow solutions provide tremendous flexibility in how we can support the imaging workflow requirements of our varied clients and enables us to deliver consistent, timely, and high-quality services."
Todd ThomasCIO, Austin Radiological Association
"Exodus has allowed us to move millions of studies quickly and efficiently. It scales and load balances across multiple source and destination servers when integrated with Compass, which speeds up the movement of data significantly. Without the Laurel Bridge solution we could not meet customer deadlines."
Jeff ColterImaging Informatics Consultant, Change Healthcare
"Navigator enabled us to reallocate a support resource that was spending almost six hours per day performing manual study lookups and transfers, to support our mammography reading workflow."
Brandon HughesPACS Analyst, Austin Radiological Association
"Laurel Bridge solutions enable us to be more efficient and productive with our clinical and IT resources. A great case in point has been the reallocation of human resources since we automated our pre-fetching process."
Brandon ReddenPACS Analyst, Austin Radiological Association
"Laurel Bridge has really been a notch above everyone else. We've gotten quicker and better service response and it seems their support staff understands issues at a deeper level than other vendors."
Richard LewisRadiology Systems Analyst, Advanced Radiology Svcs.
"Navigator allowed us to convert the studies necessary to improve patient care and lowered our migration costs by only migrating what we need. Our cardiologists and cardiac surgeons love that we can pull referential studies based on the EMR worklist."
Dan MarnachDir. of Technology, Avera Heart Hospital of S.D.