This content has been archived. It may no longer be relevant
November 29, 2016
By Josh Nash
This post is the last in a series that addresses how enterprise image access and viewing, using a mobile enterprise image viewer such as ResolutionMD, meets the three goals of healthcare reform’s Triple Aim: better care for individuals, better health for populations and lower costs.
Rising costs are a critical concern of all facets of the healthcare industry. To address the issue, one of the Triple Aim’s goals is reducing the per capita cost of healthcare. This blog looks at how the implementation of an enterprise image viewer can support this goal by enabling providers to share images, eliminating duplicate image study costs and enabling specialists to confer with primary and emergency care physicians without having to be physically present.
November 22, 2016
By Josh Nash
This post is the second in a series that addresses how enterprise image access and viewing, using a mobile enterprise image viewer such as ResolutionMD, meets the three goals of healthcare reform’s Triple Aim: better care for individuals, better health for populations and lower costs.
Improving access to appropriate care, particularly regarding specialized care for urgent, severe and complicated conditions, is a key component of the population health leg of Triple Aim’s goals. Another primary goal is to generate improved health outcomes and fewer complications for patient populations served by a healthcare system.
Both of these goals are addressed by telestroke, which has revolutionized the treatment and care of stroke patients. This post focuses on how telestroke and image sharing enables broad changes in the treatment and outcomes of stroke patients through access to stroke specialists and fast acting drug treatments.
November 11, 2016
How enterprise imaging meets Triple Aim’s goal of better patient experience of care
By Josh Nash
The Triple Aim, developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), is a framework for optimizing the United State’s health system by:
- Improving the patient experience of care
- Improving the health of populations
- Reducing the per capita cost of health care
In this post we’ll look at how enterprise image viewing improves patient experience of care, in both quality and satisfaction, by allowing providers to collaborate and giving patients and their families the ability to view patient images and better understand their conditions and diagnosis.
October 27, 2016
Recent news of fines for HIPAA violations are shining a spotlight on the need for providers to secure protected health information (PHI) with tools that support modern security. On October 18, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) announced that St. Joseph Health (SJH) will pay $2.14 million fine for HIPAA violation. The provenance of this violation offers an important lesson for all providers who want to mitigate their risk.
The violation occurred between 2011 and 2012 when SJH installed a server that included a file-sharing application with default settings that provided access to anyone with an Internet connection. This open door made the PHI of 31,800 people publically accessible through Internet search engines during the violation period.
October 17, 2016
Recent data from the American Telehealth Association[1] shows radiology leading the use of telehealth for patient care. About 20 million Americans benefitted by receiving care via telehealth and in 8 million of those cases the care was from radiology. In comparison, 1.9 million were cardiac monitoring cases, 750,000 were online primary care or urgent care sessions, 650,000 were neurophysiological monitoring cases and another 500,000 were mental health sessions.
At the same time, overall growth of telehealth as a care delivery method is booming. Modern Healthcare[2] reports that 75 percent of employers plan to include a telehealth option for their employee health insurance benefits by 2017. At health providers, the focus of telehealth implementation is shifting from interventions, such as telestroke, to broader, integrated services. These trends, among others, will create a five-fold increase in the value of the market by 2017. An Accenture report[3] valued it at $200 million in 2014 and predicts it will hit $1 billion in 2017.
October 7, 2016
Today’s enterprise image viewing needs: Multi-platform, multi-modality, multi-format and multi-departmental
Digital patient imaging is in the midst of a sea of change. First, the use of digital patient imaging is expanding outside radiology into other clinical departments such as dermatology, ophthalmology, pathology and more, expanding both the modalities and numbers of images. At the same time, value-based care, cost pressures and adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has increased the need to share patient images outside radiology. As these two trends rapidly advance, hospitals and health systems need to manage patient images across the enterprise, which requires new strategies and technologies.
September 30, 2016
The concept behind vendor-neutral archives (VNAs) appeals broadly to today’s healthcare providers: a non-proprietary archive of patient images of any type and any image-related data that can be accessed from any PACS or enterprise image viewer. With their promise of access to all images and image data regardless of provenance, VNAs are quickly becoming a central element of medical enterprise image management[1] strategies.