From the January/February 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


“I worked at Jackson Memorial Hospital, one of the largest, if not the largest trauma center in the nation,” says Christopher Hancock, director of neuroradiology at Desert Medical Imaging and founder of MyMedImage, the first crowd-sourced cloud-based solution for medical imaging. “Patients would come into trauma — gunshot victims, stabbing victims — with no images. Because we didn’t have timely access to the images, the cost to the system was huge.”

Hancock says even patients coming in under less urgent circumstances would have problems. With stacks of CDs in hand and half of them not working, imaging results simply weren’t available. Today, the picture looks better, but not by much. “Companies are moving toward interoperability, but they’re not all there yet,” he says.


The ability to quickly pull the needed information and get the patient tended to is more important than ever, with reimbursement being closely tied to patient satisfaction under new guidelines.

“We’ve been using this term, the ‘consumerization of health care’” says Carestream’s Kao. “This is where you see ACOs become advantageous because you’ll see a patient stay within the same network of physicians.”

Kao is among many who believe that the consolidation of information, while necessary for a significant leap forward for the patient experience, will not be easily realized. “I think it’s going to be done at that ACO level. The fundamental design within those networks of hospitals means you’ll capture 90 percent of the patients.”

With mergers and acquisitions occuring all the time, the role of the ACOs and their impact on health IT will only increase, especially when it comes to patient care and the budget concerns tied to their feedback.

Time is money
Even if funds didn’t figure into the equation, time as a currency is something we can’t get more of. “More time in the day, week, month and year is really needed in order to meet all the complexity we’re faced with today,” says UnityPoint Health’s Holling. “Vendor responsiveness is huge, because money aside, at least on the customer side, you really need the responsiveness to cut down on downtime and improve efficiency,” he says.

In order to improve efficiency, more control around software decisions needs to be placed in the hands of the people making sure all the parts work together. “Once the decision’s made about who’s controlling product purchase, then the decisions behind where we standardize and normalize our data has to be made,” says Gray. “At a contract level, do I have access to the tools to be able to do what I need to do, without being beholden to the vendor?”

In Gray’s opinion, that’s the only way you can assure yourself that your IT department will be able to do what it needs to do.

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