Freddie Adorno
Empowerment through modern imaging informatics
November 11, 2013
By Freddie Adorno
As a community hospital, Nyack Hospital has been nationally recognized for exemplary performance in using evidence-based clinical processes that are shown to improve care, and our Center for Diagnostic Imaging performs more than 125,000 procedures a year with a staff of 20 (rotating) radiologists. We are proud to say we are one of the first in the nation to offer our patients, referring physicians and staff one of the most feature-rich enterprise medical imaging systems that extend beyond radiology.
When we initially began the search to replace our dated imaging solution, we knew we were looking for a technology provider that was eager to embrace evolving interoperability standards, while still incorporating the devices and functionality needed by today’s physicians and specialists, such as mobile devices and a simple system for patient-centric data sharing. We needed to find a solution that was taking the next logical steps— workflow management, enterprise sharing, communication and analytics.
Although we had been using a departmental imaging solution for many years now and had seen and used many different systems, we still did our due diligence - site visits, peer references and research. From our efforts, we realized that our PACS also needed to integrate with EHRs, image viewers and other IT applications and also had to have the capacity to scale to meet our growing demands. We also felt that replacing our PACS at this time gave us the opportunity to rethink our imaging strategy and to identify the features and functionality that would help enhance workflow and productivity as well as the services we deliver to referring physicians. In order to accomplish these goals our new PACS needed to be able to adapt to bandwidth variations well and our growing annual exam volume. Although we are a community hospital, our business continues to expand and we are faced with similar competition as the larger multi-site facilities.
Our PACS needed to help us make a difference in how we managed workflow, enterprise image sharing, communication, and analytics. It was important to consider and obtain from our vendor, performance reassurances - from a validation to acceptance framework - using real life system test protocols that not only exercise the scalability of software applications but take advantage of the capabilities in today’s hardware. Recently, we learned that the vendor we selected undertook large scalability testing at the Microsoft Labs in Seattle, WA, with their latest version; the version we have implemented. Essentially, during this test they simulated an annual volume throughput of 5,000,000 exams equating to 1,600 studies per hour on a series of virtual application servers. Not only are we impressed that our vendor under took this effort but the results have been truly exciting and have demonstrated that there was no performance degradation. Although we may not realize these volumes at our facility, I think that it is important for others considering a PACS replacement to have this level of performance reassurance from their vendor. We can now take this ecosystem beyond radiology, providing accessibility on the enterprise level and to our referring community in remote locations.
Managing costs was another very important consideration for us. We need to improve productivity in a very robust solution, with the features and functionality that allow us to accurately and completely assess an image, and also allow our referrers to do so. Our system has been adopted by our referring community and is very easy to use and it has allowed us to easily, quickly and readily distribute images and information across the enterprise. In many ways, we’re doing a much better job of providing healthcare today than we were three years ago.
Our physicians are now empowered with the patient’s health record, images and reports literally at their fingertips. The benefit of giving physicians access to data on mobile devices, has allowed us to improve the delivery of care dramatically and also allowed the patient to be an active participant in the care process. The possibilities created by the mobility, scalability and accessibility in health care technology are quite remarkable. These innovations, along with many others, make it a very exciting time to be a part of the health care IT community.
About the author:Freddie Adorno, is the manager of Enterprise Imaging Informatics at Nyack Hospital. The hospital is a health care leader in New York State providing compassionate, community-based, health care services, Nyack Hospital is a member of the New York Presbyterian Healthcare System and an affiliate of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
As a community hospital, Nyack Hospital has been nationally recognized for exemplary performance in using evidence-based clinical processes that are shown to improve care, and our Center for Diagnostic Imaging performs more than 125,000 procedures a year with a staff of 20 (rotating) radiologists. We are proud to say we are one of the first in the nation to offer our patients, referring physicians and staff one of the most feature-rich enterprise medical imaging systems that extend beyond radiology.
When we initially began the search to replace our dated imaging solution, we knew we were looking for a technology provider that was eager to embrace evolving interoperability standards, while still incorporating the devices and functionality needed by today’s physicians and specialists, such as mobile devices and a simple system for patient-centric data sharing. We needed to find a solution that was taking the next logical steps— workflow management, enterprise sharing, communication and analytics.
Although we had been using a departmental imaging solution for many years now and had seen and used many different systems, we still did our due diligence - site visits, peer references and research. From our efforts, we realized that our PACS also needed to integrate with EHRs, image viewers and other IT applications and also had to have the capacity to scale to meet our growing demands. We also felt that replacing our PACS at this time gave us the opportunity to rethink our imaging strategy and to identify the features and functionality that would help enhance workflow and productivity as well as the services we deliver to referring physicians. In order to accomplish these goals our new PACS needed to be able to adapt to bandwidth variations well and our growing annual exam volume. Although we are a community hospital, our business continues to expand and we are faced with similar competition as the larger multi-site facilities.
Our PACS needed to help us make a difference in how we managed workflow, enterprise image sharing, communication, and analytics. It was important to consider and obtain from our vendor, performance reassurances - from a validation to acceptance framework - using real life system test protocols that not only exercise the scalability of software applications but take advantage of the capabilities in today’s hardware. Recently, we learned that the vendor we selected undertook large scalability testing at the Microsoft Labs in Seattle, WA, with their latest version; the version we have implemented. Essentially, during this test they simulated an annual volume throughput of 5,000,000 exams equating to 1,600 studies per hour on a series of virtual application servers. Not only are we impressed that our vendor under took this effort but the results have been truly exciting and have demonstrated that there was no performance degradation. Although we may not realize these volumes at our facility, I think that it is important for others considering a PACS replacement to have this level of performance reassurance from their vendor. We can now take this ecosystem beyond radiology, providing accessibility on the enterprise level and to our referring community in remote locations.
Managing costs was another very important consideration for us. We need to improve productivity in a very robust solution, with the features and functionality that allow us to accurately and completely assess an image, and also allow our referrers to do so. Our system has been adopted by our referring community and is very easy to use and it has allowed us to easily, quickly and readily distribute images and information across the enterprise. In many ways, we’re doing a much better job of providing healthcare today than we were three years ago.
Our physicians are now empowered with the patient’s health record, images and reports literally at their fingertips. The benefit of giving physicians access to data on mobile devices, has allowed us to improve the delivery of care dramatically and also allowed the patient to be an active participant in the care process. The possibilities created by the mobility, scalability and accessibility in health care technology are quite remarkable. These innovations, along with many others, make it a very exciting time to be a part of the health care IT community.
About the author:Freddie Adorno, is the manager of Enterprise Imaging Informatics at Nyack Hospital. The hospital is a health care leader in New York State providing compassionate, community-based, health care services, Nyack Hospital is a member of the New York Presbyterian Healthcare System and an affiliate of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.