by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | February 12, 2018
From the January/February 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Interoperability challenges from the enterprise perspective
“The biggest challenge we have in medical imaging is that there is no unified patient EHR,” says Veterans Affairs Maryland Healthcare System’s Siegel. “There is not an easy way to automatically have image data transferred from one facility to another without human intervention that confirms that a particular patient is the same patient at another facility.”
One potential solution may be to give patients access to their own EHR. The RSNA Image Share project, which was launched in 2016, allows patients to store images in the cloud, which can be used as a way to transfer images between hospitals.
The program is open to the vendors of reporting systems, radiology information systems and PACS that want their solutions to connect to image sharing networks. In January 2017, Agfa Healthcare, Ambra Health, GE Healthcare, Lexmark Healthcare, LifeIMAGE, Mach7 Technologies and Novarad became the first to successfully complete the program.
Regarding PACS vendors, one of the biggest challenges is lack of standardization. For example, Cerner has defined its own set of application program interfaces (APIs) for third-party companies, and other vendors have defined their own unique APIs.
“If a patient presents at one hospital then goes to another hospital, [the idea is to] exchange images like they can lab values,” says Erik Abels, senior solution leader for clinical and diagnostic imaging at Cerner. “That isn’t prevalent today, and I think one of the biggest reasons is because the standards aren’t well-suited for it.”
Cerner participates in a committee within CommonWell Health Alliance that is working to better define standards that will help accomplish this interoperability. Once those are defined, the committee plans to promote a national infrastructure with common standards and policies.
“Our goal as part of CommonWell is to get out of the proprietary nature and get into industry standard,” says Abels. “I think we all share a mutual goal of standard-based exchange, but it’s just a matter of how to get from where we’re at to where we want to be.”
