by
John R. Fischer, Senior Reporter | February 05, 2018
From the January/February 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
These capabilities enable providers like Mazzella to work on operational budgets and improve workflow by increasing the frequency and speeds in which they can access and read scans and make diagnoses. They also tie in other goals important to many practices, including the ability to scale up in growth and workflow consistency in tasks such as finding and adding in priors for diagnosis evaluation.
Rasu Shrestha, chief innovation officer at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and executive vice president at UPMC enterprises, says combing through his hospital’s PACS systems for patient priors in the past was exhausting and time-consuming.
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Now, since the implementation of GE Healthcare’s Centricity Solutions for Enterprise Imaging – which includes a RIS-IC, PACS, universal viewer and clinical archive – the improvements to workflow at UPMC have been significant.
“Previously, we would have to search across multiple different vaults, as we call them. Hospitals that have different PACS systems that may or may not have had those patient’s studies,” he says. “Today, with one click, we’re able to have true enterprise view across the long regional care record of the patient, regardless of which hospital system or which health system the patient’s studies actually reside in.”
But experts warn that no solution is perfect, and although a product may have impressive capabilities, there are still limitations to enterprise imaging technology and misconceptions regarding the capabilities of these evolving tools.
For instance, though zero footprint viewers may enhance the technological capabilities of radiologists, they are not changing the day-to-day tasks of radiologists. They are merely improving the speed at which these tasks are carried out by decreasing installations and eliminating complex software deployment for potentially tens of thousands of PCs in large enterprises.
It should also be noted that periphery workflow tools do not have excellent zero footprint technologies and require desktop applications.
Also, not every facility is suited for a particular solution. In the case of zero footprint offerings, one consideration is that they may not provide high performance efficiency in certain locations where poor bandwidth may result in more delays.
