by
Olga Deshchenko, DOTmed News Reporter | February 11, 2011
From the January/February 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Reading the studies is one thing but sharing them is another. Halabi says it’s often difficult to share images even within the hospital’s own health system. “A lot of redundant imaging has to be performed because we don’t have those images for the patients at the time that we need them. That’s a huge challenge right now,” he says.
If patients are transferred out of Henry Ford, the patient’s provider is responsible for sending off a patient with a copy of the study on a CD. “We have a very limited ability to send images to other health systems,” Halabi says.
There’s also the question of what to do with studies done outside the health system, in places like independent imaging centers. Should radiologists at Henry Ford read them off CDs or store them on their systems? And viewing video clips from modalities like ultrasound presents a challenge in itself (the hospital has a separate PACS just for ultrasound viewing).
A potential solution in the clouds
To overcome the problem of image sharing, Henry Ford is in the process of reviewing cloud-based solutions, which would enable its referring physicians to easily access or send study images.
“Cloud-based solutions are a great fit for some customers,” Dave Smarro, CEO of Infinitt North America, wrote in an e-mail to DOTmed News. Smarro said it can be an ideal solution for facilities with limited space or IT resources or, “where reading is done off-site and the location of the central archive doesn’t matter.”
Cloud-based solutions can potentially solve the issues of image sharing between institutions and providers and enable facilities to get a hold of critical study results exactly when they need them. Dr. Murray Reicher, co-founder and chairman of DR Systems Inc., said cloud-based solutions are stimulating interest in the area of information exchange, as well as eligibility and authorization and patient reminders and education.
But the long-term reliability of cloud-based solutions is murky. “With a cloud-based solution, you use what you need when you need it, and only pay for what you use,” Reicher wrote in an e-mail to DOTmed News. “The main disadvantage in theory is the risk your cloud-based solutions provider goes ‘poof’ like a cloud.”
Since it’s a Web-based service, providers must also depend on Internet connectivity to use it. And storing the images can add up. “The longer you keep images on the cloud, the more expensive it is,” says Daniel Giesberg, president and CEO of AMD Technologies Inc.
Figuring out the short and long-term storage capabilities of cloud-based solutions will be important over the next five years, says Giesberg. AMD Technologies is currently beta testing its own cloud-computing system with a number of customers.
