By Karen Appold
When San Diego Imaging Medical Group (SDI) merged with North County Radiology Medical Group in 2013, SDI was challenged with managing disparate silos of archived patient information and migrating all patient information from three different data sources into one common archive.
Additionally, SDI wanted to implement a platform that would seamlessly align to a local health information exchange service if it decided to use the service in the future.
While searching for an appropriate vendor, SDI researched and reviewed various providers for vendor neutral archive (VNA), portal, and analytic tool solutions to ultimately improve and streamline radiology workflow. “Vendor solutions were demonstrated and comparisons were conducted for overall capabilities, functionality, and ease of integration with the current infrastructure,” said Richard Elwell, systems administrator, SDI.
A Critical Decision
Prior to choosing a vendor, SDI used technologies offered through two different PACS solutions. Ultimately, SDI selected Burlington, Vt-based Mach7 Technologies as its enterprise image management, VNA, and physician and patient portal partner.
“The Mach7 VNA and Communication Workflow Engine will allow us to break down the barriers between disparate departmental PACS,” said Elwell. “Mach7’s platform will give our team the ability to link all images, pictures, videos, and exam data to the patient’s record from one consolidated archive. We chose the Mach7 platform knowing that it would support the complexities of this project and our continued expansion.”
“The breadth of the Mach7 platform, coupled with the culture of innovation and partnership that the Mach7 team brings to the project, helped drive our decision,” noted Rick Padelford, executive vice president, SDI.
Benefits of the Platform
The Mach7 platform provides a robust and fully functioned product set for clinical image archiving and communication. “We will be able to easily identify, connect, and share diagnostic image and patient care data and make it available where and when it is needed,” Padelford said. The innovative communication and workflow technology will deliver complete image management including rapid record identification, integration, synchronization and routing, advanced clinical viewing, and optimized vendor neutral archiving across the enterprise.
As a VNA partner, Mach7 will help SDI resolve complex integration issues between the PACS vendors, consolidate DICOM and non-DICOM image data, and efficiently reduce PACS migration efforts with an intelligent rapid migration utility. Leveraging the Mach7 Communication Workflow Engine, SDI will have access to an advanced tool set including intelligent prefetch, rule-based routing, and an intuitive admin console for monitoring, tracking, and auditing.
Mach7’s VNA will allow SDI’s IT team to consolidate storage of images and simplify access and sharing of patient data. “When the Mach7 system is completely deployed and archived data migrated, data integrity will be increased with tools that allow the IT team to continually keep data clean and maintained,” Elwell said. “We will also be able to heighten security by owning and controlling our images.” Using an architecturally neutral archive will help eliminate the need to maintain disparate, department-specific PACS archives.
In addition, leveraging Mach7’s Physician & Patient Portal, physicians will have the ability to access a complete patient record including images and reports, directly through their electronic medical record (EMR) system, and from any Internet-aware access point or mobile device. An image-enabled EMR will help physicians access the patient record with all image files available from one central location (versus accessing files from several different PACS archives). “Once patient records are normalized, a simple and accurate view of patient history, labs, images, etc, will be possible. That complete view can then be easily shared with patients and referring physicians in a timely fashion electronically,” Elwell said.
Migration efforts of patient data from older legacy systems will present a few challenges. Older proprietary file structures must be manipulated to ensure that all patient information being migrated to the VNA is cleaned and normalized. The Mach7 Communication Workflow Engine will be used to modify DICOM attributes as the studies are sent to the target archive.
Advantages for Patients
The increased ability to provide the specific imaging data required when it’s needed, where it’s needed, as it’s needed will expedite patient care. The granular control of images will completely eliminate the need for repeat procedures.
The Physician & Patient Portal will also allow SDI to securely share imaging information directly with patients. A simple patient-side interface should allow easy browsing of any portion of a patient record that a physician would like to make available. “From image viewing to e-mail, referring physicians, diagnosing clinicians, administrators, and patients can access and share a complete care record and stay engaged,” Elwell said.
Into the Future
A primary reason SDI selected Mach7 was because of its sustainable technology. “The unique architecture will allow SDI to scale without limits and extend the communication protocols without an effect on the core application logic,” said Elwell. SDI will be able to easily spin up a new virtual machine or physical server for instant scalability as needed. When new nodes are brought online, the platform is designed to automatically and intelligently adjust load balancing. Additionally, if a clustered node failure occurs, sibling nodes are designed to pick up the jobs assigned to the failed node automatically and provide notification to appropriate service personnel.
SDI chose Mach7’s yearly-enhanced service option, which includes a dedicated professional services engineer. SDI has a direct phone number to its assigned engineer, who facilitates trouble-shooting and configuration updates. In addition to standard support, Mach7’s professional services team is available to help integrate new modalities and PACS.
“Mach7’s team has been very attentive and engaged during the implementation of the Enterprise Imaging Platform,” Elwell said. “We are excited about this collaborative relationship.”
