Healthcare IT professionals are becoming more familiar with the phrase “deconstructing PACS.” It’s essentially the
process of looking at PACS from a new angle. No longer are professionals in the medical industry interested in bulky proprietary units that make it next to impossible to efficiently share medical imaging. Thus, more have taken on the deconstruction attitude when it comes to PACS.
If you are a healthcare professional who has been around long enough, you remember the days when binding service contracts and proprietary licensing and tags were the norm. In fact, those vendors are still out there today, trying to convince you that their proprietary options are the best on the market. When it comes to dealing with a proprietary vendor it’s not unlike a person looking to purchase an automobile in the early part of the 20 century – you could have any color you wanted as long as it was black. As a healthcare provider, you deserve more options, and you’re finally getting them.
If you are a healthcare professional today, deconstructed PACS to store and share your hospital data is invaluable. You want the ability to separate PACS components into multiple independent applications, including visualization, workflow, archiving and redundancy.
In the early days of PACS, they were thought of as being a convenient method for managing medical images, but only with a single type of workflow and a monolithic visualization process. While they were initially a groundbreaking technological feat, today you are demanding more from your legacy systems, more than the systems can handle.
The best PACS vendors are working to handle all aspects of hospital data, from the archiving to the redundancy protocols to sharing between facilities and departments with disparate systems. The best vendors are giving healthcare providers the ability to store imaging studies, manage workflow and control access.
Legacy systems require radiologists and physicians to share their medical images via CD burning technology, which was a major breakthrough when it was first developed. However, HIPAA regulations are easy to violate when a compact disc containing hospital data can be so easily lost. In fact, it happens quite frequently. A lost CD means rescheduled appointments for more medical imaging. It’s also a slow method of delivering medical images that physicians require for a faster diagnosis.
The best PACS vendors are providing a solution called virtual CD, which requires no CD burning technology. Instead, healthcare providers only require a secure URL and the images can be shared on a viewing station or even a mobile device. Instead of storing images on a CD in a dedicated area of the hospital, images are now being stored in the cloud. The best vendors use top-quality datacenters with redundancies and disaster recovery methods that keep hospital data available 24/7.
OffSite Image Management, Inc. has been offering cloud-based PACS with VNA solutions that are built around interoperability, flexibility, redundancy and DICOM standards. Our clients can attest to our hands-on approach when implementing our solutions, getting to the bottom of every issue that presents itself so you can be up and running in little time. Contact us today for more information.