Seven hospitals or imaging centers offered the service in September, with three other facilities expected to join soon. Physicians can access the reports via a Web portal or have them imported into electronic health records systems. The RHIO has completed integration with four EHR vendors and is working with a half-dozen others, says Ted Kremer, executive director at Rochester RHIO.
Physicians can access diagnostic images via the portal, and Kremer expects the RHIO to be able to push the images to EHRs by mid-2010. San Jose, Calif.-based Axolotl Corp., vendor of the health information exchange platform for the RHIO, receives radiology reports from participating radiology organizations. Rochester-based eHealth Global Technologies, which has developed an HIE platform for medical images, receives the diagnostic images. In essence, eHealth Global is acting as the image broker within Axolotl's HIE platform. The service stores 30 days of exams and can pull up older exams on demand in about five minutes, Kremer says.
Lakeside Memorial Hospital was the first facility to offer HIE-enabled imaging services, going live in July. The next six facilities went live during August, and physician acceptance quickly proved the value of community exchange of medical images, Kremer says. The HIE handled about 120 images during that start-up month after getting a couple dozen requests from Lakeside in July.
Other HIEs should consider offering a similar service, Kremer advises. "The big piece for us is the time it takes for radiology practices to connect to the service. It's only a couple of hours. Also, bandwidth issues have not turned out to be an issue. It's not really turning out to be too complex."
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