Imaging forecast: warmer, chance of cloud computing

The phenomenal popularity of Internet sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has forced developers at those giants to find new ways of handling massive workloads using virtualization, dynamic scaling, and cloud computing.

Healthcare IT and radiology image management are watching these developments, albeit at a safe distance. As healthcare begins to embrace the electronic medical record, hospital IT infrastructures must find ways to manage enormous patient data files. EMRs are not complete without digital imaging; yet digital image files have grown in size exponentially with the rise of high-field MR, multidetector CT, and digital mammography.

Decentralized radiology departments and demands for remote reading also require faster delivery of digital images through the enterprise, across town, and around the world.

“There is a growing need for information systems that have no boundaries,” said Jim Morgan, executive director for Network Systems at Fujifilm Medical Systems.

If radiologists can access imaging studies from just about anywhere, patients are beginning to wonder why their medical records can't likewise be accessed from any clinician's office or any emergency department, no matter where they're located. Demands for EMR integration with regional health information organizations (RHIOs) and continuity of care records (CCRs) are beginning to surface.

“The only way for radiology to meet these growing expectations is to move to cloud computing, and to use web technologies for the support of next-generation radiology tools,” said Shelly Fisher, president of Brit Systems.

Brit and other industry vendors are watching social networking sites like Facebook closely, where open application programming interface (OpenAPI) has become a popular solution to interconnect websites in a seamless, user-friendly manner. This tactic opens a new generation of possibilities for radiology image management.

Brit is implementing browser-based technologies in Roentgen Works, its next-generation PACS, and has developed a suite of radiology workflow solutions that require no installation of a client and no downloads, not even Flash.

“Our next-generation applications also provide CCRs and will communicate to personal health repositories, such as Google Health,” Fisher said.

Agfa HealthCare plans to exhibit a new version of its Impax Data Center at RSNA 2009 with features that, among other things, support sharing of enterprise medical data and images for integrated delivery networks and/or large regional health information exchanges.