Pranav Shah, Business Development Head, Healthcare IT, Agfa Healthcare, India, elaborates on how value-based care helps in building healthcare management strategy that focuses on cost quality and outcomes
Imaging has witnessed exponential growth in the last 15 years. During the conversion from film to the digitisation of images, it has spawned very strong departmental solutions. Given the transformation from film to where we are today, workflow improvements have certainly been phenomenal.
The development of these departmental solutions has resulted in the creation of silos of images and image related data. In some cases, silos were cross-departmental, but they were also created within the same department as part of acquiring specialised solutions (Mammography, Nuclear Medicine, Clinical Research, Invasive Cardiology, Hemodynamics, Electro-physiology, etc). There have been disparate attempts to try and get these images to other users via integrations and interfaces, but these attempts have been unsuccessful in completing the visual healthcare infographic of a patient.
Establish a converged enterprise imaging strategy
Value – based care is all about building a health care management strategy that focuses on costs, quality, and most importantly, outcomes. The goal is to create a culture within an organisation by removing barriers and enabling:
- Enhanced collaboration and care standardisation
- Meaningful use of medical imaging data from across and throughout the care continuum
- Immediate image exchange without heavy cost of data migrations
- Improvement of the patient experience
This not only highlights the need for developing a consolidated Enterprise Imaging approach, but also calls for establishing a holistic purchasing strategy and vendor selection. Purchasing a Radiology PACS, Cardiology PACS, vendor neutral archive (VNA), image transfer tools, and universal viewer separately, perhaps from different vendors, is one approach. By definition, this approach creates multiple (pun intended) challenges, including duplicate caches, too many databases, too many interfaces, differences in vendor vision and roadmap, dispersed management and monitoring, desynchronised upgrades, variance in disaster recovery and business continuity approaches, excessive labor to manage multiple vendors, and future disruption due to vendor mergers and acquisitions.
In order to achieve the operational efficiencies expected not only today, but in the future, the need arises for a single converged platform strategy which provides multi-departmental informatics, PACS and imaging services, VNA, image exchange, mobile display and acquisition, physician collaboration, patient engagement, foreign study management, and regional health services, on a single converged platform.
Imaging needs to follow the footsteps of the EHR, transforming into a comprehensive multi-departmental Enterprise Imaging platform. A singular platform that provides common enterprise services (interfacing, authentication, archiving, visualisation, etc…) as well as departmental imaging acquisition and management services from radiology to cardiology, GI to ophthalmology, dermatology to pathology, wound care to point of care, among others.
In order to achieve the outcomes expected not only today, but in the future, our customers have informed us of the need for a single converged platform which provides multi-departmental informatics, PACS, and imaging services, VNA, image exchange, mobile display and acquisition, physician collaboration, patient engagement, foreign study management, and regional health services.
Agfa Healthcare has developed a care-centric workflow platform called Agfa HealthCare Enterprise Imaging. This solution is standards based, improves interoperability, is modular and enables a comprehensive patient imaging health record across departments within a single facility or between multiple facilities.
We have combined traditional departmental PACS, like Radiology and Cardiology, traditional RIS, Advanced 3D, voice recognition, VNA and an Enterprise Viewer and a mobile platform, all into a single scalable application. For smaller health systems, our solution can be starting from entry level and scaled up for larger health enterprises with all modules typically activated. All DICOM and non-DICOM data formats as well as documents are managed in one comprehensive multimedia platform
We believe this new approach to medical imaging is the gold standard which others will try to emulate.
- Single-strategies solve specific problems or workflows in a particular care area, lacking coordination across the continuum of care
- A better strategy is to invest in building a consolidated platform and build an eco-system that brings clinical value across the care-continuum.
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