Medical Imaging Blog

PACS

Winter = Time for a PACS

PACS, healthcare reform, supreme court Winter: the season of Christmas, snow-covered trees, sledding…and increased emergency room admissions due to slips and falls on ice and snow. Add to that car accidents and shoveling-related back injuries and the medical imaging professionals are going to have their hands full.

After one snowstorm in early 2011, for example, the University of Pennsylvania Health System’s radiology department performed 156 injury-related x-rays over two days, which was more than double their normal x-ray rate.

When temperatures fell into the 20’s after a few days of 35-degree highs, the resulting ice led to a swarm of accident victims flocking to Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton, Mass.

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Understanding the Supreme Court’s Healthcare Reform Case

PACS, healthcare reform, supreme court Just about everyone in the healthcare world knows that the Supreme Court will take up the controversial Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) sometime in March 2012, with a decision scheduled for June.

The issues at stake, however, are less well-known. Here is a very brief summary of the Supreme Court documents that show what the justices have to wrestle with (in no particular order):

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What’s Hip: The Latest Medical Imaging Trends

Medical Imaging trends, PACS, RISIf you haven’t seen the results from Health Imaging’s latest “Top Trends” survey, here are the highlights:

  • Declining Revenues. This was the #1 business priority for physician group practices, imaging centers, and community hospitals. Cuts in Medicare and insurance company reimbursements are driving down revenues. The good news: many medical imaging practices are becoming more efficient, improving their marketing efforts, and adding new services to compensate.
  • Improving Customer Satisfaction. This was the #1 business priority for academic medical centers and multi-hospital organizations.
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3D PACS Come to the Forefront

3D PACS, PACS, picture archiving and communication systemThe day of two-dimensional PACS isn’t quite over, but it soon will be. Three-dimensional PACS are rapidly becoming the norm in medical imaging centers throughout the country.

And for good reason.

Despite the exponential growth of processing and storage capability over the past decade, the PACS products available during that time generally did not keep pace with CT improvements that enabled radiologists to take images of ever-thinner sections of the body.

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PACS Market Swings Toward Upgrades and Replacements

PACS , RIS, HISBack in May, we noted that the PACS market was growing steadily and that a significant portion would probably be in replacements and upgrades.

It turns out that we were right.

Here are the pertinent numbers from market research conducted by IMV’s Medical Information Division:

  • 87 percent. That’s the percentage of expenditures involving PACS that’s going toward upgrading existing PACS systems.
  • 85 percent. That’s the percentage of full-system PACS purchases that were replacement systems (meaning that just 15 percent were from first-time PACS buyers).
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Boldly Going Where No Medical Imaging Has Gone Before

Medical Imaging $100,000 doesn’t amount to much in the world of medical imaging. But in developing countries, it makes medical imaging available to thousands of people – and that’s just the first benefit.

Imaging the World (ITW), a US  based non-profit that develops medical training and technologies to bring medical imaging to remote areas around the world, recently received a $100,000 grant from Grand Challenges Explorations, which funds scientists and researchers worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. Grand Challenges Explorations is one of many global health initiatives funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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CVIS and PACS Ending Information Systems Silos

CVIS and PACSA recent article from Diagnostic and Interventional Cardiology confirms what we at McKesson have known for a long time: that the goal of cardiovascular information systems (CVIS), also sometimes referred to as cardiology PACS, is to replace disparate software systems with a single solution, enabling medical imaging professionals to be much more efficient while improving care.

In the past, the cardiology department would have disparate systems for cath, echo, ECG management, etc. Cardiologists and other medical imaging professionals had to log into each system separately, and in many cases, information and images that were available in one location (like a hospital) were not available at another (like a clinic). To use technical language, the systems were “siloed.”

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Effective Teleradiology

teleradiology workflowIn a previous post, Teleradiology: A New Frontier in Medical Imaging, we wrote about the “new” phenomenon of teleradiology and how it’s changed medical imaging for the better. In this post, we want to lay out the basics of an effective teleradiology system.

Hardware and Software

Effective teleradiology demands:

  • A web-based 3D PACS (to allow medical imaging professionals to read all kinds of images)
  • An RIS, preferably with speech-recognition technology
  • Integration with the healthcare organization’s other software
  • Secure – that is, includes strong security features – storage and transmission of images and patient information
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Teleradiology: A New Frontier in Medical Imaging

Medical Imaging

When you think about it, the supposedly new discipline of “teleradiology” isn’t all that new. Radiologists and other medical imaging professionals have been consulting over the phone for years.

What’s new, of course, is technology that allows organizations to set up sophisticated medical imaging systems that include the ability to send and receive images and commentary over vast distances in virtually no time at all. Consider: just 20 years ago, if a medical imaging professional wanted to consult with another one 50 miles away, he or she would have to make a copy of the image, have it sent securely by mail or courier, wait for it to arrive, and then schedule a time to discuss the image – all while hoping that nothing disrupted any of these steps. If nothing did, there was still the hassle of talking about an image without having an easy common reference.

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PACS in an Age of Change – Virtual Conference

PACS in the Age of Change - Virtual Conference

It’s free and it’s wherever you are. All you need is a good internet connection and questions about the rapidly changing PACS world.

This year’s PACS Spring Virtual Conference is designed especially for those who can’t attend the June conference of the Society of Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) in Washington, DC. It even includes a roundtable discussion co-sponsored by SIIM!

The details:

PACS in an Age of Change is on Tuesday May 17, 2011, starting at 10:00 am Eastern Time.

Presentations:

  • Meaningful Use and Radiology: What Next? Adeel Siddiqui, MBBS, Cooper University Hospital
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