There is no doubt that a majority of healthcare providers have gone filmless in their imaging informatics. In fact, the most obvious change in radiology has been the transition to remote digital 
communication, which has been made possible by PACS and electronic medical records. Furthermore, many forms of electronic messaging, including e-mail, have been employed to make this remote and filmless process a possibility.
Archiving structured data is of upmost importance to physicians and specialists who work from and rely on the availability of these images. They also rely on these images, whether they know it or not, to be stored in such a way that they are nearly impervious to disaster situations.
Going filmless is a big advantage, but it’s not without its challenges, which vendors are working to solve today. For instance, there is a lack of interpersonal communication in regards to clinical information. Another problem that exists among many providers and radiologists is a lack of easy access to medical images through electronic medical records, mostly because they are in a different application than the PACS, which has not yet been fully integrated into the solution.
What radiologists are lacking, in many situations, is the ability to easily pull up information on medical records. Most computer users are familiar with Google searching any topic they wish to gain more information about, however, such inquiries aren’t possible with many electronic medical records systems. The result is a lack of interchange in medical data and radiological images, even though this information is transferred via electronic devices through a network.
The greatest challenges for imaging informatics and archiving structured data today include communication of information and tagging and indexing large amounts of data related to diagnostic imaging. It’s not uncommon for radiologists, and doctors for that matter, to make a recommendation on various issues that aren’t regularly followed up on. The reason could be because of the limitations of the information systems currently in use.
We see evidence in other scientific fields where the specialists do a great deal of tagging and indexing. Even in the medical field, cardiologists have done a great job in making their results readily available in a fashion that is well structured. Archiving structured data in a proper way could help medical imaging become just as available, indexed, searchable, tagged and communicated.
PACS and electronic medical records aren’t always matching up like they should. What can assist a better alignment would be the use of vendor neutral archiving, which makes the communication problems so often seen between disparate systems go by the wayside. Instead of struggling to get archived data from its silo to the workstations of the physicians that need to see the medical images, VNA assists medical professionals in gaining access to everything they need, from wherever they happen to be.
OffSite Image Management, Inc. knows the struggles that radiologists have in bringing medical images to providers in an unhampered fashion. We’ve created solutions that take the difficulties out of archiving data and accessing it in a reasonable fashion. Contact us today to find out how we do it.