SAN DIEGO - The benefits of using a cloud-based service to share medical imaging studies and reports will be the focus of a presentation at RSNA 2011. The talk by Mark D. Kovacs, M.D. and Michael A. Trambert, M.D. reviews experience witheMix™, the industry-leading cloud-based medical data-sharing service.

eMix will also be exhibited at the conference, along with two new features that greatly expand its capabilities.

In their presentation, Drs. Kovacs and Trambert will describe the technical barriers to sharing patient data between healthcare providers with different, proprietary information technology systems. They will also note the problems associated with the workaround solutions developed to overcome those barriers. These solutions include faxing, burning images to CDs, and sending files via virtual private networks.
The inadequacy of these solutions leads to patients being subjected to redundant imaging studies 10%-to-20% of the time, which exposes those patients to excess radiation and adds billions of dollars to national healthcare costs.

The presenters will then demonstrate how cloud-based services have addressed the issue by providing data-sharing that is low-cost, secure, near instantaneous, and vender-neutral.

"Cloud-based information-sharing is a major development in medicine that has received far too little attention," said Dr. Trambert. "Until eMix was launched a couple of years ago, we had few good options if radiology files at one location needed to be read quickly at a distant location. Thanks to the early adopters of the cloud services, emergency patients are already receiving much faster diagnosis and treatment, with far wider adoption of this technology to come."

Dr. Trambert is the Lead Radiologist for PACS Reengineering for the Cottage Health System and Sansum Clinic in Santa Barbara, Calif. Dr. Kovacs is a Radiology Department resident at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital.

Their presentation will take place during the 3 p.m.-4 p.m. time period on Tuesday, Nov. 29 in Room S402 in the South Building, Level 4.

The new eMix features on display at the conference include 1) the Zero Footprint Viewer, which enables the receiver of an eMix package to do a full clinical review of the images on computers or mobile devices, and 2) EMRconnect™, which enables medical facilities to auto-send medical reports electronically, in multiple file formats. These reports can then be automatically harvested into the receiving EMR.

The feature-rich Zero Footprint Viewer makes it possible for physicians to clinically review imaging files on Internet-connected devices anywhere in the world, without having to move the files onto a PACS or other third-party application. This purely browser-based viewer is included as part of the eMix package.

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