Related Items
Accessing Images: The Next Step
April 30, 2008
Like many health care organizations, Mercy Medical Center didn’t begin to realize the full potential of its picture archiving and communication system until it began integrating it with other technologies to provide broader, enterprisewide access to images.
In 2004, the Des Moines, Iowa-based integrated delivery system, which includes four hospitals, added a Web server, which enables staff and referring physicians to access diagnostic images more frequently during clinical care. The increased use, however, presented a new problem for I.T. staff—how to ensure physicians still had access to the electronic images if Mercy’s network went down.
“If something had happened to our original PACS, the plan was to order new equipment and restore the images from tape,” says Roger Wilson, systems and networking manager at the delivery system. “That would have been a long, laborious process. Mercy recognized that PACS had become so important to physicians and patient care that we decided we couldn’t be down for that long of a time. So we started to look at what we could do to fix that.”
Mercy already had a storage area network that backed up its data systems, but the technology didn’t have enough capacity to also support diagnostic images. So it integrated and deployed several technologies to create a tiered storage area network and recovery strategy for images initiated within its PACS, from Carestream Health Inc., Rochester, N.Y.
“We now can push out the functionality of our PACS further because the storage solution we have is more scalable,” Wilson says. “These functionalities were always there before, but now we can use them more quickly.”
Next Steps
Integration is often the next step for hospitals and group practices that have become accustomed to using a PACS. Now that many vendors offer combined imaging and radiology information systems, providers are integrating PACS with other technologies, including storage systems, network technologies, electronic health records systems and even other provider organizations’ networks.
Such initiatives can help improve access to diagnostic images at multiple sites, offer disaster recovery and extend many of the benefits electronic clinical imaging can offer. They also, however, can be very expensive and time-consuming, industry experts say.
But over the past year, some organizations, including Mercy Medical Center, have finally begun to reap the fruits of their labors, says Todd Frech, senior partner at Ocius Medical Informatics, a Ravenel, S.C.-based consulting firm.
“The investment in technology and integration is finally paying off,” he says. “In the past year, things have really started to take hold. Now many organizations can more easily admit a patient and do procedures because they are more tightly integrated.”
Many organizations have made progress with their imaging system integration using a variety of strategies and technologies, Frech adds.
For example, some hospitals now provide their own clinicians with direct access to a PACS because they’ve integrated the system with network technologies that offer enhanced bandwidth or storage capabilities.
Others have implemented customized, secure Web viewing applications to give referring clinicians limited access to select images. Further, some organizations are requiring physicians to use basic image-viewing software on their computers to access images from their homes or remote facilities, Frech says.
Not Easy, But Getting Easier
“Some organizations are still struggling to improve access to images if they have older systems that don’t have the capacity to enable so many integrations,” he says. “But a lot of these issues are being resolved now with improvements in technology. Hospitals are working to make better use of their imaging systems. It’s not quite as hard as it used to be."
Health Information Exchange Archive
Medical Imaging Archive
Systems Integration Archive
Hospitals Archive
Group Practices Archive
Marketplace
- About Us
- Advertising/Media Kit
- Reprints
- Editorial Calendar
- Contact Us
- Customer Service
- Privacy Statement
©2008 HealthDataManagement and SourceMedia, Inc. All rights reserved.
SourceMedia is an Investcorp company.
Use, duplication, or sale of this service, or data contained herein, is strictly prohibited.
