Medical imaging and healthcare digitalization have seen significant advances and evolution in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed many challenges for health systems, especially regarding faculties for enterprise and external data use, exchange, interoperability, scalability, accessibility, and other facets aligned with digital transformation strategy. Similarly, the pandemic stressed and catalyzed imperatives prioritizing health systems investments in enterprise digital transformation. Today, most health systems are moving away from individual PACS (picture archiving and communication systems)Â and embracing enterprise imaging and informatics as a staple of healthcare delivery organizations. Significant gaps in processes and purchasing decisions prevent healthcare systems and hospitals of all sizes from becoming truly integrated and complete digital enterprises.
As data becomes crucial to healthcare outcomes and staying competitive, health systems need to adopt long-term strategies that unlock all available data, whether within electronic health records (EHRs) or other systems, to address efficiency and enable better decisions for organizational performance and patient care delivery. Storage and analysis of big data allow for more actionable insights, inferences into a patient’s well-being, and decision support for clinicians in improving patient outcomes, the speed of service, and diagnostic abilities.
For further information, download our complimentary white paper here.
“The right enterprise imaging and informatics strategy has the potential to predict health trends at a population and individual level on a long- and short-term basis, helping clinicians pre-empt adverse health events with preventative medicine, exercise, or nutrition. The innovations are integral to a value-based care model and reduce healthcare costs across the board,” noted Daniel Ruppar, Consulting Director, Healthcare and Lifesciences at Frost & Sullivan. “The strategy also allows for reconciliation between aspects of workflow, merging the needs of traditional imaging service lines with data- and machine-driven approaches to provide a new way of working and operating in imaging.”
Enterprise imaging can create the efficiencies needed in the future to create more sustainable and affordable healthcare while future-proofing organizations to deal with tomorrow’s challenges. A solution utilizing vendor-neutral archiving (VNA) technology seamlessly integrates pre-existing PACS solutions, enabling deeper and more effective data analytics into image data and future-proofing a data set to enable a prospective vendor to migrate it in the future with no loss of value. Other benefits include:
- Better and more secure communication and collaboration.
- Collation and presentation of all relevant clinical data through a unified patient view.
- Satisfaction in patients and providers and maximizing revenue and healthcare outcomes.
“The COVID-19 pandemic provided a glimpse into the enormous potential of digital transformation in healthcare,” said Larry Sitka, Vice President of Enterprise Applications at Canon Medical Informatics. “Healthcare organizations now recognize that enterprise imaging is imperative in care delivery that can not only improve the quality of care and financial performance but also offer improved patient, staff, and provider satisfaction.”
Removing localized caching and synchronization problems will lead to reductions in storage costs, added security as protected health information is not exposed in multiple places, and data accuracy. These will in turn result in improved satisfaction levels among patients, staff, and providers.
