Offsite Radiology and Informatics: Where We’ll be in Five Years.

The number of patients seeking out radiology services rises everyday. The technology to serve these patients is also changing, as is the workflow. What needs to happen to make sure this influx of patients is getting the quality care they need?

Healthcare facilities are starting to figure it out, but close attention must be paid to how integrating information systems can assist the workflow, especially as more offsite radiology services are needed. Picture archive and communication systems (PACS) have to be built to communicate with other systems so more radiologists, doctors and specialists in other regions can view the images.

The average healthcare facility has 59 steps associated with its radiology services, from the referring clinician to the ward clerk, nurse, medical clerk, transportation aid, radiology clerk, film room clerk, transcriptionist, technologist, dark room tech and radiologist. Can the radiology department continue like this into 2018? What integration solutions can help radiologists skip some of these steps? Custom interfaces built for each and every vendor and facility are in order.

Medical professionals are looking to build such an interface that takes the necessary measures to reduce those steps from 59 to 9. The average scenario might look something like this: the referring clinician has an order entered into the healthcare information system; the transportation aide take the patient to the radiology department and then back after the images are taken; the technologist obtains images and checks them for quality; finally, the radiologist reviews the images and uses speech recognition software to make notes into the PACS.

Radiologists are relying more on third party vendors to offer them storing and sharing options for their images. A great number of the most efficient solutions are cloud-based and utilize level IV data centers for the most secure and consistently available services.

Interactions between PACS and what users want to do at their workstations are becoming more complex. Medical staff needs access to various archives with a choice of interfaces that best suites each staffer. They need to log in from anywhere to get access to these images, which is what cloud-based solutions can offer.

Looking ahead into the very near future of radiology, communication will continue to be extremely important. The Millennial generation is the next group of radiological professionals and they are extremely computer literate and always in contact with their peers, whether it’s through text messages or instant messaging on the computer. That same level of communication will be expected within the radiology department and across the campus of the medical facility.

OffSite Image Management, Inc., is ahead of the curve and ready to offer new clients a more efficient, safe and ready solution for radiological image sharing, access and storage. The vendor neutral archiving services allow facilities with disparate PACS to communicate freely. OffSite has built its solutions to be compatible with other applications. Offsite radiology is the name of the game, and OffSite has solutions to keep every medical facility in it.