Streamlining Medical Image Access and Sharing
About the Author: Ken Rosenfeld is president and CTO for eHealth Technologies. He has over 27 years of HIT industry experience which includes positions at Eastman Kodak as a worldwide business manager for HIT Enterprise Storage and Archiving and leading their $80M PACS business and healthcare information systems’ global R&D organization.Sponsored by: eHealth Technologies
Managing transitions of care continues to be one of the most disconnected and wasteful aspects of healthcare today. Consider that:
• About 30% of patients forget the CD
• It costs > $10 to create an imaging CD
• 22% of CD’s don’t work
• Up to one-third of CT exams are unnecessary
• 10% of today’s healthcare dollars go to medical imaging procedures
• 1-2% of cancer deaths may be due to a cancer caused by a CT scan
It seems obvious that streamlining the sharing of historical medical image exams should receive significant attention. What is needed to solve these issues and ensure that a patient’s historical medical images can be promptly accessed by all caregivers, is a solution architecture that anticipates and supports the need for images to be available along with the rest of the patient’s required medical history.