How Virtual CD Set Hospitals Free.

Healthcare software providers built up some great solutions for the medical community as the digital age progressed. Unfortunately, they also created a method whereby they locked providers into the chosen solution. If the provider wanted to stay current, they had to stay current on the vendor’s updates. As long as no communication was needed between disparate hospitals, everything ran fairly smooth.

Times have changed. It’s rare that a patient will see one doctor or specialist to treat them.Healthcare systems have increasingly merged to create more solid healthcare institutions. Health information exchanges are now commonplace. The original model no longer works because the healthcare industry has to interoperate, which means data has to be shared, securely across many borders. Information silos were once the norm, but now they’re basically extinct.

When digital images first came around, radiologists would share their images with doctors and specialists through compact discs. Radiology departments invested heavily in expensive disc burning technology, burned their discs and mailed them off to the people who needed to see the images. The problem is, the discs didn’t always burn properly and the mail method was no faster than mailing off film images. If a problem occurred with the disc, the doctor or specialist had to contact the radiologist and ask for another copy.

Another problem with mailing CDs out is that they would often get lost in transition. This is not only an issue that prevents the patient from receiving the treatment they need, it’s also a violation of healthcare regulations regarding privacy, and results in serious fines. It’s obvious that organizations still using the antiquated CD burning technology are not meeting interoperability standards.

Picture archiving communication systems (PACS) would seem to solve this problem, but due to the architectural design of many PACS systems, there are limitations regarding how the information is shared. PACS, like other technologically advanced systems, undergo frequent upgrades and modifications, which can be a source of stress for hospital administrators looking for operational consistency.

How about the much-touted vendor neutral archiving (VNA), which is supposed to allow disparate institutions to share images seamlessly? This is also an area, when not truly carried out in a true vendor neutral architecture, can get road blocked by the frequent changes in technology. It seems that there are differing definitions of a true VNA is, which means that one VNA completely differs from the next and doesn’t allow the migration of data from one source to another.

How can all these issues be circumvented? Easy – through a product called Virtual CD, which has been developed by the radiology professionals at OffSite Image Management, Inc. The technology has essentially set hospitals free because they are able to receive medical images immediately from any workstation thanks to Virtual CD. They are then free to make their diagnoses based on the images, which are either viewed online or can be downloaded into the hospital’s PACS. There is no more need to stand in line and wait to burn a disc of the images, which may or may not work.