Shelly Fisher, president of Dallas-based BRIT Systems, likes to illustrate the advantages of her company's cloud-based PACS/RIS with a story about the IT manager of a hospital using the system.

One day, he got a call — his son was in the hospital in Oklahoma with abdominal problems, and it was unclear if he would make it through the night. The IT manager hopped on a flight, and made it to the hospital to consult with the son's doctor, who told him the results of his son's CT indicated everything was normal. Sensing he needed a second opinion, the IT manager got a CD with his son's scan, loaded it into his laptop and placed it in the cloud, asking one of the radiologists he worked with to take a look. That radiologist determined there was a mass in the son's abdomen and after consulting with the doctor, the son was taken into surgery.

"It's a fundamental shift in technology and how people are going to approach accessing information," Fisher told DOTmed News. "It's enabling patients to have better health care."
Cloud-based systems, and the Software as a Service and pay-per-use models that go with them, are helping to simplify image sharing across health care organizations and cutting costs for radiology practices that no longer have to pay software licensing fees and maintenance costs.

One big advantage of a cloud-based PACS, which BRIT runs with a pay-per-use model, is that it allows radiology practices to treat the service as a commodity, instead of a capital purchase, which has costs associated with maintenance and access.

It can cost around $40,000 to set up a client-server electronic health record (EHR) system, according to a 2011 report in Healthcare Finance News. With a cloud-based system, images are stored on external servers. With BRIT's product, information can be accessed via a web browser, so only a computer with an Internet connection is necessary.

If a radiology practice has its own storage system, "they'll be paying for it years after they received money for a study," Fisher said.

With a pay-per-use model, they're going to pay the company for the cloud-based storage at the same time they get paid by the insurance company or the government.

"There's a real financial incentive to have all the costs of the study paid for in a certain time period," Fisher said.

BRIT's most popular service is the price-per-study model. Radiology practices that are very small might pay a set amount per month. BRIT also offers five gigabytes of storage, which can store about 100 studies, for free.

There are also additional benefits that practices would otherwise have to spend more money to get, such as disaster recovery, or storing images on servers in different locations.

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