Medical imaging was revolutionized by the digital age. Radiology practices quickly ditched
their antiquated film practices and started storing and sharing their images via CD. Adopting the new technology included investing in expensive CD burning equipment.
Unfortunately, the costs keep mounting. Every CD costs anywhere from $8 to $16 to burn and store. Some of the smallest critical care hospitals burn 20 CDs a week. This adds up over time, especially for the rural practices that have few resources and low budgets.
Many times, patients are entrusted with the CD to take to their specialists so they can see the images during the appointment. Sometimes the CD hasn’t been burned correctly. Other times (30 percent by some estimates), the patient misplaces the CD or simply forget to bring it to the appointment. It’s not efficient and leads to patients rescheduling appointments. There are also HIPAA concerns to consider with physical copies of the CDs floating around from place to place.
CDs are often sent by express mail, which is expensive and slow, even though it’s express. Most patients want their doctors to have access to the data they need immediately and they don’t want to see the extra charges mounting on their medical bills. The CD burning technology is inherently slow. People stand in long lines at the radiology department to get a single copy of their CD burned. Some radiology departments even put a full-time person on staff to handle this. It’s really not worth the time, effort or cost.
The thing is, sharing exams is one of the fundamentals of providing quality radiology services. It’s all about continuity of care, the best quality of medical care possible from the biggest hospitals down to the smallest. How can this “new” technology be of any use in providing the above-mentioned fundamentals when it has so many drawbacks?
There are solutions cropping up now that are far more beneficial, these solutions involve saving images in the cloud. There is no more purchasing costly and massive proprietary CD burning hardware and technologists in the radiology departments are no longer spending far too many hours burning CDs. With the solution in the cloud, there is no more worry about whether or not the CD burned properly. There is no issue regarding storage space and the security of that storage space, and there is certainly no more worry about losing CDs.
With the solution in the cloud, the images are available at any time, immediately. Doctors simply pull up the data they require to make decisions about their patients’ healthcare needs through the Internet.
OffSite Image Management, Inc., has developed a cloud-based program called Virtual CD, which replaces all the CD burning hardware with an easy-to-use custom URL. The encrypted URL comes with a protected password that the patient gets via email or printed if that’s the preferred option. Doctors can download the images to their PACS or print them.