From the November 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

Giving the experts their due: IT staff execute the solutions for clinical problems. Talk to the specialists who are using the imaging systems and tailor an enterprise-wide implementation that solves their specific problems so they can deliver better, efficient care.

Choosing a hybrid network-and-cloud model: One side facilitates sharing within the network firewall, and the cloud component gives providers outside the firewall secure access to needed imaging studies. This enables physician collaboration outside of a network for referrals and second opinion reviews.


Selecting a partner with the most usable tools: Whatever technology vendor your organization selects, carefully choose the standard interface physicians will be using to interpret and review clinical images, and make sure not only that the correct features are built in, but that it’s intuitive to use in all of the clinical workflows. Usability isn’t a “nice to have,” it’s a “got to have.”

Rolling out first to the specialties that need it most: Chances are, if IT staff has not set up a formal imaging workflow for emergency medicine and the stroke neurologists, those specialists probably have devised an ad hoc workflow to share images. Clinicians for which treatment time is crucial will benefit the most.

Radiology remains a key entry point for images on a network. Understanding this dynamic is a crucial facet of the enterprise imaging strategy. It’s incumbent upon IT to support medical imaging’s needs. But there is a shift where there are more specialties whose imaging access and use need to be addressed. Once all of the back-end technical issues of an implementation are addressed, imaging repositories become an open system with a common viewer, integrated with the electronic medical record.

While building enterprise imaging strategies now falls on enterprise-wide decision-makers in a health system — because such strategies span specialties far beyond medical imaging (radiology, cardiology, oncology and others using PET scans, etc.) — medical imaging leaders should sit on planning committees for developing enterprise imaging strategies. After all, they were the earliest adopters of imaging among the specialties, and they have the most institutional knowledge of how the technologies and workflows dovetail to create positive patient outcomes.

About the author: Richie Pfeiffer is vice president, product management, at lifeIMAGE.

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