With the ever-changing technological landscape, it’s difficult to predict where the next trend is going to take the healthcare industry. Certainly, as the cloud computing revolution has proven, sharing and storing medical imaging should continue to see a performance boost with every new technological advancement related to cloud computing.
As a professional working in the healthcare industry, surely you’ve witnessed some of the emergence of enterprise architecture, which has actually been building up steam for about 20 years. Healthcare enterprise architecture has assisted hospitals and clinics, small and large, in building better business strategies around their IT capabilities.
The trouble with most healthcare enterprise solutions is that they tend to be inconsistent when it comes to coordinating with other facilities. As an industry, there still needs to be some advancement that will assist medical professionals in sharing data across departments and from hospital to hospital/healthcare professional to healthcare professional.
It’s not surprising, but the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology issues a regular report that fails to make note of healthcare enterprise architecture. It also doesn’t talk much about framework related to IT. However, what if we looked at other terminologies and how they might be associated with healthcare enterprise architecture? What about analytics in healthcare or health information exchange? You’ve definitely heard about health information exchange because you’re probably in the midst of creating one for your own facility right now, or at least thinking about it. These terms definitely have something in common with healthcare enterprise architecture.
You’ve also probably been involved in electronic medical records and looking for solutions to better store and share your medical images. Electronic medical records are supposed to offer your facility a more cost effective means of storing and accessing data. However, is the software and hardware you invest in today going to be worth anything in a few years? Will it live up to your expectations now and will it let you communicate with other departments and doctors in other facilities?
Just because you’ve found a solution that involves tossing all of your paper documents into a database doesn’t mean it’s a viable solution that will improve the way your facility delivers healthcare to patients.
The first thing your solution should do is help you get to better health outcomes. Physicians need access to medical images, fast and on the go. The proper enterprise architecture will deliver this to them. You also need a solution that is secure. The last thing your facility needs is to worry more about HIPAA violations. Partnering with the right vendor who works with Level IV data centers is a step in the right direction.
At OffSite Image Management, Inc., we’re developing the next step in enterprise architecture by focusing on vendor neutral archiving. When a rural facility needs to send its medical imaging to a specialist across the county or across the state, OffSite has the solution that will offer that capability, but not by compromising security. Call us today and find out how you can improve your healthcare processes and save money while doing it.