what is enterprise imaging?
What is Enterprise Imaging? Why does it matter and what advantage does it bring to healthcare today? The answer should be simple. Turns out it is not. Many imaging vendors are out there claiming to provide Enterprise Imaging because they have a PACS that can store and view Radiology (DICOM) images from other specialty PACS systems or have a VNA that can archive DICOM images. But, is that all there is to an Enterprise Imaging strategy? The answer is a resounding NO! According to the HIMSS-SIIM Enterprise Imaging Workgroup, the definition is:
“a set of strategies, initiatives and workflows implemented across a healthcare enterprise,” enterprise imaging is used “to consistently and optimally capture, index, manage, store, distribute, view, exchange, and analyze all clinical imaging and multimedia content to enhance the electronic health record.”
The gap between our competitors who are archiving images and Apollo comes down to a few simple things in the definition above:
The Workgroup recognized that Radiology isn’t the only department capturing and storing images and put language in to specifically address clinical multimedia. Radiology departments don’t want all the “other ology” images in their PACS, which was designed to aid a Radiologist to make a diagnosis. Radiologists rarely look at anything besides CT’s MRI’s, X-Rays, etc. They don’t want to be responsible for storing any other department’s images.
There are many vendors who offer a Universal Viewer, but, most of these are optimized for DICOM viewing, and even if they can view other image types, they often require secondary systems to view non-DICOM images such as JPEG, Tiff, and MP4.
PACS vendors are the best at capturing DICOM images in the Radiology department, and there is a whole ecosystem to make that happen. Where this fails is outside of Radiology. When you ask a wound care nurse to follow the Radiology workflow or ask an ER physician to create an order before doing a Point of Care Ultrasound, they won’t necessarily know how, have time, or have the access to do what you are asking them to do. Their workflow does not follow an “orders-based” workflow. “Optimally” gets tossed out the window so someone in IT can archive an image.
