Radiology professionals can’t ignore the latest technological advances that are changing the way
medical imaging is carried out today. If they do patient care could lag behind.
Some people are still trying to figure out what makes the cloud a step up, even though it’s been around for a decade. Healthcare providers often ignore the cloud due to various security issues, which have now become fairly rare. However, the medical community is now jumping into global cloud computing, which has grown into a nearly $2 billion industry for healthcare alone. The changing landscape is expected to become very apparent over the next few years as the market could hit the $6.7 billion mark sometime in 2018.
What many in the industry are concerned about now is that medical images are very large files that are expected to take up as much as 30 percent of storage, worldwide. When you consider that a hospital as small as 100 beds will perform up to 50,000 radiology exams annually, you can begin to see a clearer picture regarding the amount of space we’re talking about. To deal with the issue, healthcare IT professionals are coming up with cloud-based PACS and/or image exchanges.
A radiology PACS system deployment in the cloud makes sense to radiologists who are looking for more practical methods to store and share images. It’s a timely venture as most hospitals are looking to invest in electronic health records or are already in the middle of implementing them. As they build in image viewers into their electronic health records infrastructure, the cloud is often playing host to many of the processes.
The Government Accountability Office reports that around 75 percent of radiology work is done at satellite offices, often far from the hospital, which means there needs to be a reliable bridge that connects the radiologist and the doctors who rely on these images on a daily basis. A vendor neutral system is the go-to source for getting these images where they need to be, and the cloud is becoming the primary place for this to occur.
Everything is scalable in the cloud, unlike an in-house server system that has to be maintained and extensively altered to accommodate change. A Radiology PACS system using vendor neutral archiving gets to the bottom of the wants and needs of the medical community while offering cost advantages as well. MD Anderson Cancer Center, for instance, is operating its radiology PACS system in the cloud and expects to save $30 million over an eight-year span.
OffSite Image Management, Inc., is a company dedicated to offering its solutions in the cloud. We fully embrace true vendor neutral archiving and we’ve improved the way many healthcare facilities operate by pairing them with VNA services. To find out how you can improve your workflow and provide better services to your patients, contact us today.