Continuity of care, especially for patients that are transferred between organizations, suffers from the lack of any organized, efficient methodology of collecting and forwarding the required records and diagnostic images required for treatment. Healthcare organizations have been struggling with these problems for many years, and despite all of the digital technology and social media that connects us as individuals, our healthcare system remains broken. Rather than disparate and mostly unconnected solutions for transferring records and sharing images both inside and outside the organization, we desperately need a single, unified solution that will assure timely arrival of records and images to the caregivers that are responsible for the patient’s treatment.
This is the opening paragraph of a white paper I recently wrote under an unrestricted grant from eHealth Technologies. The paper can be retrieved from the eHealth Technologies web site using this link. The video of the webinar on the same subject can be viewed from the eHealth Technologies web site using this link. The paper can also be downloaded from this web site using this link.
The choice of technologies is interesting, because of the multiple packaging options that are supported. One combination of the technology components becomes a standalone electronic image share solution designed for image sharing between organizations as well as between the organization and outside physicians…a replacement for the dreaded CD exchange program. Another combination of the components becomes a universal viewing application that supports image sharing within the organization through image-enabling of the Electronic Medical Record system. A third combination of the components becomes a method for image enabling the local Health Information Exchange. Each of the three image sharing problems can be solved individually, or a single unified configuration can be used to solve all three image sharing problems.
The title of the paper, “Unified Approach to Sharing all Images and Records to Streamline Continuity of Care and Achieve Meaningful Use” is a mouthful, but the paper itself does a good job of presenting the problems, critiquing traditional solutions, and presenting the eHealth Technologies solution suite. I recommend reading the paper and taking a look at the webinar video, if you prefer a visual presentation