IMAGING Q&A Imaging’s Journey to the Cloud
When you look at the current state in the evolution of imaging, what do you see as the greatest challenges, and the greatest opportunities, in the current moment, and in the next five
years? Technology is coming into play now where we are seeing the removal of silos that will create true enterprise- wide access to all imaging files and con- nect to the EHR, leading to optimized performance across on-prem and cloud systems. Challenges for many hospitals and clinics are systems that interface poorly, —if at all— with too much time spent in administration and mainte- nance. We also see too little insight as to how processes can be improved to ease the daily life of physicians, care teams members, and IT administrators and ultimately drive improvements in patient care. As one of our IT customer development partners noted in a recent podcast, this means moving from a technician role to more of a consultant role—where they can drive more busi- ness value rather than dealing with day to day routine tasks.
What is your perspective on the state of interoperability in imaging right now? What are the remaining barriers to true
interoperability? Standards like DICOMM, HL7, FHIR and others offer different paths to shar- ing data between systems. There is a tendency industry-wide to hold onto key pieces of functionality with proprietary tech that forces healthcare IT leaders to either pick-and-choose solutions and rely on standards-based interoperability or move to a single vendor to reap per- formance rewards but potentially lose functionality available elsewhere. We’re seeing an accelerating trend towards publicly available and/or licensed APIs that should drive enhanced interoper- ability, but there’s still a way to go.
Are we on the verge of a new way of thinking about image-
sharing, and of accomplishing it? I think the new way of thinking has
been here for a while, and the new ways of accomplishing it have been slowly coming on line as well. There are new ways of distributing imaging to health professionals between organizations such as our recently launched imaging file-sharing service—reducing adminis- trative burden and accelerating patient care while cutting back on unnecessary imaging. There are new ways of con- necting new imaging audiences from care teams to patients using zero-foot- print viewers, EHRs, and patient por- tals. And there are new infrastructure solutions in the cloud—such as the Change Healthcare Enterprise Imaging Network™
Archive—that make storing
and serving the files wherever they need to go faster, cheaper, and more efficient. It’s the start of a whole new world for the ubiquity of image sharing.
Enterprise-wide imaging informatics has been evolving forward as a concept, but challenges and obstacles remain. What do you see as the biggest ones, and how will they be
overcome? The single largest barrier to informat- ics and analytics at scale is the removal of silos and the collection of data sets into a unified source of truth—an area where the near-infinite scalability of cloud offers solutions. The addition of AI and ML to the mix makes automa- tion of routine tasks such as cleaning up metadata or tracking performance against SLAs into table stakes, with the large data sets empowering everything from deep analytics across the modern enterprise to providing foundational training for new generations of diag- nostic algorithms.
What are the biggest challenges, collectively speaking, facing all vendor organizations in this space, in the next few years? And now can vendors become more responsive to the needs and express desires of clinician and non-clinician leaders in patient
care organizations? At Change Healthcare, we identified
Archie Mayani
VP/Head of Product Management Change Healthcare
several core challenges that apply industry-wide that we have been work- ing to address for several years. First, the cloud and AI both offer compelling promises for cost savings, simplified management, and improved outcomes. They will drive the majority of strategic development decisions for the coming few years—ensuring that solutions are designed for the cloud and AI integra- tion (cloud-native architecture). Single- instance SAAS cloud solutions built in an Agile environment offer the solution to the second part of your question, as they allow frequent and rapidly-devel- oped upgrades to be delivered across an entire customer base—instantly and at the same time. Industry standards and purpose-built APIs for cross-system integration will need to be constant companions in development to ensure that the benefits of a given solution can be optimally delivered everywhere.
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