• Cloud’s role in cybersecurity and data backups and recovery

Less talked about, but just as essential, in driving this move to the cloud: growing radiologist burnout.

Radiologists are in desperate need of something to lighten their workloads

Radiologists are facing multiple competing pressures today, chief among them the skyrocketing volume of imaging studies. Aging populations, more complex diseases, and patients seeking procedures they deferred during the height of COVID-19 have all coalesced to cause a spike in medical images. And more images to read means a greater need for more storage for those images.

The job has become too complex – too many images, too much data, too many potential insights to draw from for growing numbers of patients, with not enough radiologists to go around to handle them all. As a result, radiologists are burning out at alarming rates, contending with workloads that are becoming impossible to manage.

Radiologists need better technology to help lighten their workloads. That means more collaborative workflows, interoperability between reading tools, and remote access capabilities that enable radiologists to read images from anywhere, at any time. Technology needs to help radiologists do what they do best: look at images, find potential health issues, and pass along their insights to the physicians and their patients. And this tech needs to be seamless; it can’t be something that radiologists have to manage themselves, stacking more work on top of their day job.

Cloud can help enable all of this, creating an environment where better technology can be deployed to make radiologists’ jobs easier and faster. Certain features of the cloud – availability, remote access, interoperability, and vendor neutrality – are especially important for making life easier for radiologists.

Constant availability
The most important thing for any radiologist is that their system works. That the PACS is up, running, functional – and can be relied on to do this every day. Constant uptime and availability are mission critical. In an on-premise environment, that availability is not a guarantee. Imaging organizations that operate entirely on-premise essentially put their eggs in one basket – or rather, store their data in one building. If anything happens to that location, all of that patient imaging data is either lost, or is only recoverable after an expensive, time-consuming remediation process (assuming the data can be retrieved in its entirety at all). All the while, radiologists have no backups to work off of, setting back their patient workloads by hours, days, and potentially even longer. For a radiologist, downtime is a daily source of anxiety.

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