Now that hospitals and health systems are finally maximizing the electronic health record, AGFA HealthCare North America President Mark Burgess wants to make sure that they’re not missing out on another critical digital element of connected care: enterprise imaging, including the company’s breakthrough technology enabling the Imaging Health Network™. Think of it as meaningful use taking on the efficient management of medical imaging.
“Many people don’t realize that the imaging side of healthcare is a whole other health record, in many critical ways,” Burgess says. “It’s a key additional dimension to understanding and treating a patient.”
After dedicating a significant portion of his 20-year healthcare IT career to the EHR technology space, Burgess draws some key parallels between the EHR and the Imaging Health Record—the building block of the geographically-distributed Imaging Health Network. He’s seen exactly what the EHR, when deployed well, can do when it comes to painting a comprehensive view of a patient’s health—and, perhaps more importantly, what it can’t do. At least, not without a little help from the specialists in imaging.
“The imaging discipline obviously focuses fully on diagnostics. It uses data to create a literal picture and therefore a quality care pathway for the patient,” he says. “Imaging has to be part of the clinician’s treatment plan. You can’t do it with just the labs or just the physical exam. You need to bring in imaging too.”
While the benefits of integrating imaging records with the EHR are clear to Burgess, he also understands that in order to bring providers on board, convenience is essential. In an ideal world, it should be simple for clinicians to incorporate imaging insights into whole-patient healthcare decision-making. Burgess’ job is to make that vision a reality—working hand-in-hand with healthcare partners to show them how the right imaging IT tools can lead to better outcomes for patients and more efficiency for physicians.
Intuitive workflows make clinicians’ lives easier
To make Radiologists’ lives easier, AGFA HealthCare’s Enterprise Imaging platform (AGFA EI™) not only lessens the total number of clicks and sign-ons, but also creates intuitive, seamless workflows that are simple to follow even on first use. Along the way, these workflows integrate the platform’s core benefits: speedy, cloud-based access to images across multiple service lines, along with shared reading capabilities that help direct reading radiologists’ eyes and talent to the most appropriate cases based on custom criteria such as availability and expertise.
“Imaging has to be part of the clinician’s treatment plan. You can’t do it with just the labs or just the physical exam. You need to bring in imaging too.”
- Mark Burgess, President, AGFA HealthCare North America
“The goal is for the workflow to manifest itself in a way where people say, ‘OK, this makes sense to me,’” he says. “And then they get into the flow of being the best they can be in their work.”
AGFA HealthCare continues to refine those workflows with the help of data from thousands of clients across different specialties, making significant investments in observing and understanding the way that those clients work.
“What we really learned on the EHR side is that you have to put dedication and focus into how certain specialists get the most out of certain workflows,” Burgess says. “And you really have to measure those outcomes over time, so that you can go back to product management and bake it into the product, the implementation, and the account management. Any technology that's being put in front of the physician is always going to be judged on the quality of the workflow.”
Custom-tailored workflows: The ‘Rubik’s cube’ approach
Some imaging teams like to tinker with workflows more than others, either to create their own specialized paths or to make tweaks to the way that their practitioners experience the platform. One of the key benefits of AGFA EI, Burgess notes, is it’s highly configurable.
That allows the technology to meet the needs of individual departments and facilities—and even individual practitioners—in order to align with the many different ways in which they prefer to complete their work.
“It’s got a lot of levers you can pull, and the way in which you pull those levers—and the sequence in which you pull those levers—can create a sort of Rubik’s cube,” he says. “You can turn it in all kinds of different ways.”
The result is a platform that can be adjusted to each service lines’ specific needs or ways of working. “Ultra-productive and satisfied clinicians is the objective for designing technology with frictionless access to tools and images,” he says.
Selling solutions, not products
As clients figure out how to best make use of AGFA EI’s underlying capabilities, the company’s experts are with them every step of the way, thanks to a high-touch approach to client relationships focusing on personal attention and service.
The goal, Burgess says, is for his organization to emphasize that they are not just selling the platform as a prepackaged product. In other words, they’re not selling a commodity; they’re selling technology solutions with flexibility and scale.
By collaborating closely with AGFA HealthCare every step of the way, hospitals and imaging providers benefit from the advice and close consultation of experts who are well-acquainted with industry best practices. Their expertise extends to a nuanced understanding of how specific healthcare challenges vary across different segments.
“The goal is for the workflow to manifest itself in a way where people say, ‘OK, this makes sense to me. And then they get into the flow of being the best they can be in their work.”
- Mark Burgess, President, AGFA HealthCare North America
“The way the government wants to experience our technologies and capabilities is different from a hospital health system, which is different from a province in Canada,” he says. “So we want to tune the way in which we deliver our capabilities to the audiences that are receiving them.”
While understanding that every client is unique, the ability to apply “lessons learned” from similar clients can be invaluable, Burgess says. “We’ve deployed this technology so many times, in so many places. We’ve seen it all. That’s a key ingredient to our success.”
Made for this moment
As consolidation continues to reshape the industry and financial pressures abound, enterprise imaging is resonating more now than ever before, Burgess says.
“Healthcare organizations are really fatigued with the high number of vendors they have to manage,” he says. “Say you have multiple imaging vendors that do different types of imaging or do it at different specialty levels—we can alleviate the complexity of a vast majority of that.”
He’s also quick to note that enterprise imaging isn’t a direct replacement in the sense that it’s not a substitute—it’s an entirely different approach, one that checks all the necessary boxes in ways that are more effective and more efficient, making other vendors obsolete.
Looking into the near future, Burgess sees another shift in the industry that will make secure image sharing and management even more important: a move toward more imaging studies taking place outside of hospitals.
“Some 60 percent of medical images are captured in the four walls of the hospital today. Forty percent are captured outside of those four walls. Over the next five years, that ratio is going to flip,” he predicts.
We know that patients, especially post-pandemic, are seeking out convenience in healthcare. For example, many people would prefer to do an X-ray once—and only once—at their provider of choice, and have it shared remotely with any necessary clinician stakeholders.
Not only is that more convenient for patients, but it’s more cost-friendly for providers. Which, of course, is the ultimate goal.
“As a society, we're trying to spend less in healthcare,” Burgess says. “We're trying to get people to live longer. We’re trying to create healthier populations. And we at AGFA are contributing by giving people access to key patient-centric information when and wherever they practice medicine.”