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Imaging is critical to all medical specialties so it is logical that images should be available to specialists outside of radiology. There is a trend to reduce repeat exams by making images more easily accessible, including prior exams. This traditionally has been accomplished using the cumbersome process of mailing or physically carrying CDs to referring physicians. Often these CDs do not open or take a long time to download. Stage 2 Meaningful Use requirements for certified electronic medical records (EMR) also call for the sharing of medical images electronically to help improve efficiency and reduce healthcare costs. All of these factors have given rise to remote image access systems.
Today’s digital picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) is highlighted with several choice words around the industry: accessible, flexible, Web-based, thin client versus thick client and vendor-neutral. Whatever term is used to describe the PACS of today and the future, one thing is clear: the aim now is to be able to store medical images, sourced from any modality, in a secure location on a network and retrieve them for review from any platform or any device.
Several industries have used cloud solutions for many years, but cloud computing only recently started to be used in healthcare. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cloud computing is defined as “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”1 As more and more healthcare organizations (HCOs) adopt electronic medical records (EMRs), the cloud database has offered an efficient solution for image sharing, particularly in radiology where it is bridging the gap between referring physicians and radiologists.
CoActiv Medical has been awarded a U.S. patent for its Exam-Sender technology, which automatically transmits medical images, voice clips, reports and other patient information over the Internet to authorized users on remote PCs.
CoActiv Medical will debut Exam-PACS 3.0 at the 2013 Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) conference.
Today’s remote viewing systems will stimulate changes and challenges in healthcare in a manner similar to what online banking has done for the financial industry. The areas of improvement include safe, secure, remote access from any browser, or ultimately any mobile device. This is the reality of today, and it comes without the need for special applications or image and associated data downloads from virtually any source.
Ed Heere, president, CEO and founder of CoActiv Medical (Ridgefield, CT) passed away on May 16 of cancer.
If you are part of a health system that has spent months building and designing a new picture archive and communications system (PACS), it is undoubtedly an exciting time. Reaching the point of PACS activation and getting staff up and running is a true milestone. Once your company reaches this point, it may feel like the hard work is over and that it is time to take a deep breath, but in reality there is still much more to do and questions that have to be answered in order to fully support your organization during and post PACS go-live.
As other industries turn to the virtual cloud for a variety of information technology (IT) solutions, those in healthcare — especially in radiology — continue to weigh in carefully on the pros and cons of running software tools, as well as hosting their data and medical images, on a third-party server. While the potential for lower costs, improved scalability and faster deployment of services is attractive to physicians and hospitals, concerns such as security issues and increased dependence on an external service provider can also factor into decisions regarding the cloud.
November 20, 2012 — CoActiv, will demonstrate the Exam-Browser cloud-based, zero-footprint, universal clinical viewer at RSNA 2012. It enables anywhere, anytime review of medical images and reports. Using the technology, imaging professionals can manipulate exams quickly and securely from virtually any browser-enabled computer or mobile device, anywhere in the world.