One of the biggest advantages healthcare facilities with radiology PACS systems enjoy is the speed at which they can store, access and send their medical imaging. However, the advantages melt away when the PACS won’t effectively communicate with other systems. What you can do to improve your current workflow process and save diagnosis time is to implement a vendor neutral solution.
In the best case scenario with a medical emergency occurring in a rural area, the rural, critical care hospital can take the medical images that reveal the problem and those images can easily be transmitted to a care facility in another location. Many critical care hospitals will not have the resources to perform major surgeries, which leads to the patients being flown or driven to a larger facility. Instead of taking more scans, the doctors there can use the ones taken at the rural facility. However, too often, patients have to undergo another round of medical imaging at the larger hospital because the rural care facility doesn’t have the right solution in place to transfer the medical imaging.
Some areas, such as in rural Maine, healthcare providers are expanding PACS systems so that there will never be a disruption in communicating the images that doctors need on patients coming from other facilities. Within minutes of an image being made, it can be available to anyone within the PACS system. This gives doctors the opportunity to save time when offering their diagnosis, which means patients are getting a better chance at recovery.
Radiology PACS system implementation, as the IT professionals at the Maine healthcare facilities found out, isn’t always easy. Some of it has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with radiologists not willing to work with others in larger facilities. Most facilities enjoy their autonomy, but for the benefit of the patient, opening up to an exchange makes sense. Some radiologists need to be reminded that it’s not about the facility – it’s about the patient.
The technological challenges facilities face include patient identifier issues because every facility uses a different identifier for patients. The group in Maine was able to pool together and work out a solution for this by creating an enterprise patient index that link every identifier by facility.
Whenever healthcare providers can join together and link their PACS they no longer need to pass jackets of film or CDs with images burned into them. These antiquated processes had their share of issues, including being damaged or lost during the transfer.
At some point, a patient is going to go to a healthcare provider that is outside of the PACS exchange hospitals have created. This is a situation that requires a vendor neutral solution that lives in the cloud. OffSite Image Management, Inc., has created a solution that will work.
At OffSite, we know how important it is for rural communities to have access to the same quality of care that people in the urban areas receive. We’ve created a vendor neutral archiving solution that offers department and practices the seamless image storing and archiving capabilities that work across any PACS, regardless of the vendor. For more information, contact us today.