Ascendian Healthcare Consulting
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Sharing — it’s a quality we all learned at a young age to aspire toward. Our parents, our teachers, our friends and our siblings (OK, maybe not our siblings!) all challenged us to learn to share. Over the past few years with implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), even our federal government has created an impetus to share — to share information, to share patients, to share revenues, to share responsibility. With the scramble toward Meaningful Use (MU), which inherently requires exchange (sharing), we are finally seeing that the theory is much easier than the execution of that idea.1 Many large organizations are still struggling to share information
April 01, 2015 
It’s no surprise to state that healthcare technology has been slow to mature. However, much of this perception has come from lack of a greater picture; the proverbial “forest for the trees.” No longer is radiology defined as a siloed infrastructure or walled-off service line catering only to physicians utilizing the platform, but it is now considered the transactional hub of services driving a consumer-based healthcare product. Although reimbursement and organizational strategies have driven much of the recent evolution, consumer awareness and attention to healthcare costs are pushing a demand for greater visibility into the mechanisms of healthcare.
March 03, 2015 
Having been active in the age of transformation which manufacturing, retail, finance, high-tech, oil and gas all experienced in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, I realized that healthcare would have its date with enterprise-wide change. Healthcare as an industry has existed for too long in an environment of stasis. Now with the rapid pace of technology, competition and exorbitant costs, it is evident to the patient, the competition, the government and the rest of the world that it must adapt to survive. Medical imaging is a profit center for most healthcare providers and has historically been the hotbed for technology advancement and innovation.
January 30, 2015 Having been active in the age of transformation in which manufacturing, retail, finance, high-tech and oil and gas all experienced in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, I realized that healthcare would have its date with enterprise-wide change. Healthcare as an industry has for too long existed in an environment of stasis, now with the rapid pace of technology, competition and exorbitant costs, it is evident to the patient, the competition, the government and the rest of the world that it must adapt to survive. Medical Imaging is a profit center for most healthcare providers and has historically been the hot bed for technology advancement and innovation.
December 18, 2014 
Let’s face it, vendor neutral archive (VNA) is a hot topic these days and one you cannot avoid. Unfortunately, and much like the overly used and tiring buzzword “cloud,” the term VNA becomes a nebulous descriptor when comparing multi-vendor platform offerings. Although a gut feeling instinct to drive or kill this new initiative is immediately felt (visceral experience), driving an “apples-to-apples” RFP process can become a daunting task of fine print and between-the-lines exercises. Others may defer to their existing vendor for the solutions that may leave them without the feature, functions or future capabilities they will need.
November 06, 2014 Ascendian Healthcare Consulting, a national healthcare IT consultancy, partners with Medical Imaging expert Mike Cannavo to deliver the PACS Check Up and PACS Sanity Check to healthcare providers seeking evaluation and optimization of existing radiology imaging
November 04, 2014 
Patient radiation dose safety has become the latest buzzword. With the emerging regulations and mandates, technologies and best practices, the radiation safety information pool has become convoluted with disparate and conflicting information. With numerous opinions and interpretations on radiation safety trends, best practices, regulation updates and studies, healthcare providers as well as the general public are experiencing difficulties filtering the true message in managing patient radiation dose away from the industry noise. Healthcare providers are constantly reviewing and assessing regulations, best imaging processes and the emerging technologies — including automated dose management systems and dose management computed tomography (CT) devices — promising to decrease or eliminate the chance of another sentinel event.
October 03, 2014 
One of the emerging health information technology (HIT) initiatives being considered and evaluated by providers across the country is the transformation and modernization of medical imaging strategy — or subsequently —architecture. The promise of a vendor neutral archive (VNA) or an equivalent medical image-object management solution is one of interoperability and rapid, simplified access to all medical imaging assets. This is further enhanced by the ability of the platform to act as a disaster recovery or the backbone of a health information exchange (HIE) with image management capabilities for patient data.
September 04, 2014 
Provider directories and trust mechanisms for the push and query retrieve models of healthcare information exchange (HIE) are being constructed at a national level. HIEs are piloting exchange, but data flow is limited. No matter what governance and operational characteristics are selected within various regions — either full electronic health record (EHR) or a secure direct messaging system for disaster recovery — the value of HIE to patients, physicians and payers must be quantifiably demonstrated. In other words, HIE will need to develop a business model where sustainability is paramount and moves beyond generating revenue for the vendors who today control the allocation of resources.
April 09, 2014 
Ascendian Healthcare Consulting announced a new service line to assist clients with ensuring the confidentiality, integrity and availability of patient data — the medical imaging client’s privacy, data security and patient safety consulting services.
September 30, 2013