Medical Image Sharing with Mach7 Technologies

http://www.mach7t.com/solutions/acces... There is no denying the real value medical image sharing brings to healthcare. In this video, Eric Rice, CTO of Mach7 Technologies and Carol Corder, Director of Imaging and Non-Invasive Cardiology at Regional Medical Center Bayonet Point, address the regulatory and market dynamics that are driving adoption of medical image sharing solutions and how these solutions are evolving. They also provide real life examples of how image sharing brings clinical and patient value as well as what hospitals and healthcare systems should look for when evaluating medical image sharing solutions.

To learn more about Mach7's medical image sharing solutions, visit http://www.mach7t.com/solutions/acces...

Mach7 Technologies
120 Kimball Avenue, Suite 210
South Burlington, VT 05403

Partial Video Transcript:

Tracy: Hi, I'm Tracy Granzyk, here on behalf of Health Data Management at RSNA in Chicago in 2015. I'm here speaking with Eric Rice, the Chief Technology Officer at Mach7 Technologies. We also have Carol Corder, the Director of Imaging and Non-Invasive Cardiology at Regional Medical Center Bayonet Point. Eric, why don't you kick us off and talk about image sharing in general. Can you define it for us?

Eric: Absolutely. Good question. You know, image sharing today in our industry, there's a need to be able to better share imaging data between healthcare organizations and even share with the general practitioner, the referring physician, the pediatrician or even the patient. When we talk about image sharing, it's really about how we move that data. The movement of the data could be inbound into your facility, or it could be how we move it outbound to a facility. There's various flavors of doing that. Sometimes it's system to system type sharing, whereas other times it's a system to the cloud or a system to a website or a portal for how we share imaging data.

Tracy: When it comes to the health system side, what do you do to evaluate a good image sharing solution?

Carol: A good image sharing solution today with the constraints that we're under has to be cost effective. We look at the easiest solution to install, the ease of the end user. We don't want extra hardware. We don't want to deal with servers that we have to store a lot of data on, so the cloud based image sharing is optimal. We look at what will be the easiest for the patient to access, and the security around that. We absolutely have to secure that patient data.

Tracy: So the cloud is actually a great aspect for a company to provide access too.

Carol: Yes.

Tracy: What are some of the things you might tell someone to avoid?

Carol: We don't want extra hardware, the cost of installing hardware or servers that we have to manage or data storage that we have to add to every year as we grow in our imaging. You know, we've gone from the days of film, which was easy to pass from person to person, but now we've got massive blocks to data that we have to deal with and store and pass to physicians and patients as well.

Tracy: That talks a little bit about how solutions have evolved. I mean, did you want to touch on that a little bit more?

Eric: Absolutely. I think as Carol highlighted, you know, in the '70s we didn't share.

Carol: No.

Eric: You know, we moved into the '80s and '90s, we printed film.

Carol: Yes.

Eric: In the '90s and beyond, we've been burning a lot of CDs. As we've evolved through these image sharing solutions, the headaches have changed. Even today where if a patient walked in with a CD, it can be difficult. If that CD was not created to IHE compliant standards, it may be difficult to import. Now I see the evolution more to a cloud based, URL based, email based form of sharing.

Tracy: So that multiple users can access the same data.

Eric: Right.