How Is Your Legacy Imaging System Impacting Department Performance?

That’s a tough–but necessary–question to ask about a system that forms the technology backbone of your radiology department or group.

According to the Medscape Radiologist Lifestyle, Happiness & Burnout Report 2021, 40% of radiologists report feeling some combination of burned out and/or depressed.

Here are six things to consider with the legacy imaging system:

Imaging data silos

The stubborn truth is this: Silos remain across departments and facilities, and that’s despite the increase in medical imaging data. This impacts healthcare providers who continue to operate with traditional software designs or software on individual physical servers, which can force them to suffer needless inefficiencies and delays associated with patient care.

Tracy Byers, senior vice president and general manager of enterprise imaging at Change Healthcare, says, “We’re thrilled to be bringing a feature-rich, highly secure, zero-footprint, cloud-native PACS and our natively built AI solutions to market.”

Misallocated resources/costs

When staffing hours, maintenance spending, and other resources aren’t aligned properly with business goals, that’s a problem. When medical imaging systems are in high demand, they may consume an inordinate amount of resources or cause other applications to under perform.

Moving enterprise imaging to the cloud has three key benefits: It saves money, facilitates critical enhancements with patient care, and simplifies IT. An ACHE-hosted webinar, Moving Enterprise Imaging to the Cloud: Is Your Organization Ready?, features leading experts on this topic. The experts discuss the following topics:

The benefits of hosting imaging in the cloud.
Best practices for cloud migration.
How to achieve rapid ROI with cloud-native imaging.

IT complexity

How frequently is your organization doing updates? How much time is the facility spending on maintaining multiple systems? And what about persistent headaches caused by increased security risks?

These are three questions keeping you and your colleagues up at night. The answer: The ability to read, archive, and view imaging data across the enterprise with an integrated, web-enabled platform that features an enterprise PACS and a vendor-neutral archive.

With Change Healthcare, radiology groups and healthcare facilities get seamless advanced visualization tools, along with web access to multimodality breast imaging, for example. One impact on mammographers: They don’t need dedicated visualization and mammography workstations.

Limited interoperability

The pain associated with a lack of interconnected systems is simple: Radiology departments and practices can’t provide data-driven, collaborative care. In response, Change Healthcare provides insight and practical solutions for reducing clinical variation by relying on integrated diagnostic imaging and radiology workflow management solutions with VNA and EHR interoperability.

Two quick benefits:

Access to complete patient information. Provide clinicians with immediate access to each patient’s imaging records and medical history to help support patient care and physician engagement.
Help reduce costs and effort with deployment. Take advantage of cost-effective solutions that meet the requirements of different sites and end users, while making the best possible use of existing investments.

Unmet key performance indicators (KPIs)

Unmet goals start with poor visibility into business metrics. With access to data analytics technologies, radiology practices and departments can enable and measure future optimization and transformation activities.

The challenge: This information is typically scattered across multiple systems. Change Healthcare developed a white paper to support radiology practices and departments in analyzing and understanding operational performance and monitoring key performance indicators.

Limited access and collaboration

Care team collaboration is vital to keeping patients healthy. But it’s virtually impossible with dedicated workstations of on-premise systems across multiple locations.

Common workflow challenges disappear when radiology practices and departments deploy integrated clinical, communication, and workflow tools that increase participation through the care cycle. Change Healthcare provides an integrated, web-based PACS for radiologists who want to have access to desired features and capabilities, while keeping costs down.