The Benefits of Cloud PACS
Few professionals in the healthcare industry can say they don’t rely on quick and
easy access to medical images. Whether it’s a clerk filing the paperwork for a patient or a surgeon studying an image to plot out a procedure – the availability of images is extremely important. Cloud PACS are making those images easier to access.
For many years, on-premise PACS were the only way to go when looking for medical imaging systems. Unfortunately, most PACS don’t communicate well with PACS made by disparate vendors, which means if the cardio department implemented a PACS from one vendor and oncology implemented one from a different vendor, there is a chance that those two PACS wouldn’t communicate. Now that patients are seeking out their healthcare needs from multiple providers at different hospital systems, it’s obvious that something needed to change for imaging to be accessed and shared.
The thing about cloud PACS is that there isn’t a huge difference overall from traditional PACS. However, there is one huge difference and that is in cloud PACS’ ability to share images with providers, regardless of what system they’re running – all they need is secure access to the Internet.
When you go with a cloud PACS vendor, you don’t house any of the hardware at your facility as it’s located in data centers chosen by the vendor. Everything is hosted off site, which has several advantages to on-site image storage, the first of which is disaster recovery assurances. Regardless of what is occurring at your facility, be it a tornado, hurricane or fire, your images are safely stored in data centers geographically remote from your area.
By now you’ve likely not only heard of but have been connected to software-as-a-service, or SaaS. Cloud PACS could also be considered SaaS, and it’s changing the way providers look at the medical imaging environment. Facilities that adopt cloud PACS shift their thinking from a capital investment to an investment in operations. IT professionals no longer are tasked with establishing and maintaining server rooms, software updates or any other tasks related to on-premise solutions. That job now falls on the vendor.
For facilities that have for years relied on CD burning technology to share their medical images, cloud PACS takes that cumbersome task out of the scenario. CDs are often lost, which means there is risk of violating HIPAA rules and regulations. CDs are also often burned incorrectly, which means a patient shows up at their appointment with a CD that’s unreadable, wasting time and money. Cloud PACS require nothing of the patient other than a secure URL from which the images can be downloaded and/or viewed.
OffSite Image Management, Inc., has blazed the trail for cloud PACS and offers providers of all sizes an effective and efficient means of archiving, sharing and accessing images through the cloud. Our services are priced to please; yet the quality of our solutions is leading the industry. Contact us today to learn more.