Cloud PACS Becoming the Solution to Medical Image Management
The impact that critical access hospitals and rural clinics have on the well being of Americans’ health can’t be understated. For example, despite the fact that roughly a quarter of the population in the country lives in rural areas, only 10 percent of practicing physicians live in these rural areas. Could cloud PACS be the solution to the problem surrounding the availability of medical image management?
Do you know what the main reason is for 25 percent of transfers from a rural facility to a tertiary care center? If you said it’s because of a lack of radiology services, you’re right. Most of them are transferred because there is no radiologist available to interpret an exam. A smaller number were transferred simply because the rural facility didn’t have the proper radiology equipment. However, of those who are transferred, only half are admitted to the tertiary care facility.
There are several problems with this scenario, including the fact that some of these patients are transferred via air ambulance, which is costly and not always covered by insurance. Some facilities are trying to get around this transfer issue, as a whole, by partnering with a larger hospital group that can assist them with their radiology needs.
For small care facilities that fear losing their autonomy due to these partnerships, it’s become a less-than-perfect scenario. There is another way to address this issue that allows these facilities to remain intact and gain access to industry-leading medical image technology, and it’s available in the cloud.
If you have worked with any cloud-based solutions, you know there are no management responsibilities on your end. Your servers don’t house the programs and your IT staff isn’t responsible for any upkeep or upgrades. The same can be said of utilizing a cloud PACS solution.
When you consider various cloud PACS vendors, make sure they are open to working with your unique needs. Also, make sure they aren’t building solutions solely for multi-system hospitals or using single-server systems, because these will not be effective for your needs or offer the guaranteed uptime that you require.
Pick a vendor that will give you zero client administration, offer annual software upgrades, give you browser agnostic viewing capabilities, and provide you with all the scalability you require for the future of your organization.
You want to concentrate on patient care, not healthcare IT processes, which is another reason you want to adopt a zero client administration solution. Don’t choose just any provider of cloud-based services; pick the one that has led the industry for years in 360-degree diagnostic image solutions – OffSite Image Management, Inc. Our cloud-based solutions give you the control you need to remain autonomous and offer the best care for your patients. Contact us today and let’s talk about how we can save you money while boosting your cloud PACS game.