Rural hospitals often struggle with bringing in new technologies, mainly due to a lack of resources, both financial and personnel; budgets are easily strained and the best educated workers flock to more urban areas. New solutions are becoming available to critical access hospitals – solutions that don’t require a large amount of resources.
Facilities with outdated rural hospital data archiving systems are asking too much of them. PACS built a decade or more ago aren’t able to deliver, which can impact the level of patient care you provide at your facility. If you’re asking your PACS to do more than you know it should be or can be doing, it’s time to consider some low-cost yet high-quality solutions delivered in the cloud.
Accessibility problems are pushing IT administrators to seek out new methods of delivering and archiving medical imaging. Sharing patient images and data between departments, especially between hospitals, is something that can be made much easier through something called vendor neutral archiving (VNA) and DICOM. Using this method, healthcare providers can archive and share data through all types of formats. The only thing it doesn’t do is over charge you for its services.
Look at the successes Atchison Hospital in Atchison, KS had with its rural hospital data solution. This is a facility that had been asking too much of its PACS for a long time, and something needed to be done. It is just one of many rural hospitals throughout the country that needed to upgrade its PACS so that accessibility was no longer an issue. They needed a solution that not only allowed patient data to be shared more easily between departments and hospitals, but a solution that also allowed patients to be more mobile with their data, which is something all hospitals are trying to address today.
Implementing a new PACS can be expensive, which is why so many rural facilities aren’t considering this as an option. Furthermore, many of the systems the Atchison Hospital administrators looked at were not only too expensive, the vendor didn’t offer maintenance, support or upgrades. They found the solution they were looking for through OffSite Image Management, Inc.
OffSite’s team implemented it’s product, Virtual CD, which means they are getting technology that allows them to take their CD burning technology out of commission and go with a cloud-based solution that allows medical images to be shared through a secure URL. This is where the mobility portion of the solution comes into play – doctors and specialists can now view medical imaging through any device with a web interface. Patients are also able to view their images and data.
Critical access hospitals are turning to OffSite for their radiological archiving and sharing needs because of the company’s focus on high-quality solutions using VNA, DICOM and cloud-based image sharing processes that allow doctors to deliver better patient care. For more information on OffSite, visit us online today and look over all of our rural hospital data solutions.