For all the pleasures rural residents enjoy away from the hustle and bustle of city life, there are some disadvantages related to healthcare, particularly for women. Rural hospitals are often short on oncology specialists and many technologies that are common in urban areas, such as high-tech radiology equipment for improved medical imaging capabilities.
Rural women experience more false-positive cancer rates and also more incidences of aggressive breast cancer subtypes. Rural women are less likely to have mammography screenings and it is thought this also leads to a higher rate of advanced-stage cancer.
While there are some biological factors that determine cancer rates among women, and rural women are about 10% less likely to develop the disease compared to urban women, yet rural women have lower survival rates.
Cloud-Based Solutions
The use of cloud-based healthcare technologies, including medical imaging, has been a positive force in the life of rural women who can access what was not possible before the Internet. The best vendors of cloud-based services offer exciting new mammography viewing technology that includes such important tools as reference lines between MLO and CC images, reference lines between MG and US, as well as tomosynthesis cine + MIP creation. Also, as you shop for a vendor, make sure they are also able to offer mammography CAD support of virtually any vendor.
Other tools, such as an implant blocker for easier viewing of exams on women with implants, measurements and annotation tools and semantic interoperability should also be on the list. Make sure when you adopt new technologies, they are interoperable with your current infrastructure. By partnering with the right cloud-based vendor of radiology viewing technology, rural healthcare providers can gain access to technologies that would otherwise be out of the budgetary possibilities.
Partner With a Third Party
At OffSite Image Management, we have offered healthcare professionals the ability to gain faster and easier access to medical images and related data. For example, our MAMMO technology gives radiologists in urban and rural areas the best mammography viewing technology in the U.S.
Whether it’s mammography, ultrasound, CT, MRI or tomosynthesis, you’ll get a better solution for viewing exams, which leads to faster diagnoses and better patient care. If you’re a rural provider and have sought out ways to improve the outcomes of your patients, contact us today and find out more about all the advantages you’ll get with OffSite and our medical imaging solutions.
