From the January/February 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Enterprise imaging as the ultimate goal
In recent years, the concept of enterprise-wide imaging has gained a lot of traction, but not without causing some confusion as to what the term really meant. In May 2016, The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) partnered with The Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) to define enterprise imaging as, “a set of strategies, initiatives and workflows implemented across a health care enterprise to consistently capture, index, manage, distribute, view, exchange and analyze all clinical imaging and multimedia content within the EHR.”

Getting images where they need to be has given rise to many innovative solutions to a problem that virtually every hospital and imaging center has struggled with. Unlike conventional PACS providers, which arose in an era when digital X-rays were mainly the business of the imaging department alone, companies like LifeIMAGE have emerged with a singular focus on improving image and information accessibility.
“What provides value is the interoperability of the different technology components that allow the acquisition of the unique piece of medical information to a specific patient to actually make a difference in a diagnosis or treatment plan,” says Matt Michela, CEO of LifeIMAGE.

His company conducted a survey in 2016 including 100 members of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) that found enterprise imaging strategies are key priorities for hospital chief information officers (CIOs) with more than 58 percent of facilities having implemented an enterprise imaging strategy to help manage, store and exchange medical image data.

Unfortunately, most of the respondents described poor returns on these initiatives. While interoperability is perfectly in line with value-based care, more than half of the organizations surveyed reported they were not yet able to move imaging data between systems and applications due to unsolved technical issues.

One-third of the CIOs who responded to the LifeIMAGE survey reported that their facility might be losing revenue because of image data interoperability challenges.

So how can a facility make sure its big jump into enterprise imaging enhances value-based care as opposed to delaying diagnosis, causing unnecessary duplicate exams and furthering the pinch on its bottom line? It requires a great deal of homework and choosing the right partnerships to meet specific needs.

January/February 2018 Magazine

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