Epic launches new one-click feature allowing outside hospitals to share medical images without CDs

Electronic health record giant Epic on Thursday announced the launch of a new feature that allows outside hospital systems to share medical images without having to resort to compact discs. 

The Verona, Wisconsin-based vendor this month is rolling out its Care Everywhere Diagnostic Image Exchange across the Epic community. It lets hospitals easily swap diagnostic-quality scans including CTs, X-rays, MRIs and more. 

Epic hopes the update will allow physicians to get the information they need sooner, spurring better patient treatment. 

“Care Everywhere Diagnostic Image Exchange empowers clinicians to deliver faster care and eliminates administrative burden,” Matt Doyle, Epic’s director of interoperability, said in a statement Aug. 13. “We’re the first to embrace open image-sharing standards at scale, and we’re advocating for TEFCA [Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement]—the federally sponsored interoperability framework—to embrace these standards so that any health system in the United States can exchange diagnostic images.”

Epic for years has allowed healthcare organizations to share written radiology reports and reference-quality images, providing clinical context with less detail than larger files that are more costly to store. With the update, providers can now use reference images to pinpoint the scan they need and retrieve it “with one click.” 

Such diagnostic-quality images are typically stored in picture archiving systems outside of the EHR, the company noted. Until now, diagnostic image exchange hasn’t used open standards, limiting file sharing. 

“As a result, health systems are burdened with manual image retrieval, and millions of patients across the U.S. still carry their images on CDs from appointment to appointment,” Epic said in its news update. 

Care Everywhere “is closing the gap,” using open image exchange standards and “existing interoperability pipelines” to transport high-quality images between hospital systems’ PACS. Epic noted that this is critical when a patient must undergo a repeat scan, since their provider doesn’t know it was already done elsewhere. The vendor notes that its “duplicate order checks” have long flagged imaging already performed at other institutions. These flags prevent over 21,000 repeat scans per year, with Diagnostic Image Exchange now letting providers access those prior images. 

More on efforts to ‘ditch the disk’

Epic’s update comes after the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently launched a Diagnostic Imaging Acceleration (“Ditch the Disk”) work group on July 27. The focus is on making electronic imaging exchange across organizations seamless, the American College of Radiology reported in an Aug. 6 news update. 

The CMS initiative is modeled after goals long championed by the ACR-led Ditch the Disk campaign, launched in 2019 alongside the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) and others in the industry. Those involved have pushed for easier image exchange through advocacy, developing new data standards, collaboration and social media outreach, ACR said. 

The new CMS workgroup is part of a broader Health Tech Ecosystem initiative, with voluntary industry pledges aimed at improving interoperability and patients’ access to their records.