Better Practice Integration Through Technology

If some form of practice consolidation is in your radiology practice’s present or future, you should know that many tactical errors are made around the difficulty of sharing information across disparate legacy PACS packages and other peripheral solutions used by newly conjoining practices, departments or organizations. These challenges often arise early on in the merger, acquisition and divesture process—yet don’t become pressing until after the deal has closed. 

The good news is that technology-related difficulties are usually solvable by technology-enabled strategies. 

Some practices and organizations have worked through their PACS integration issues by standardizing to a single vendor’s product. This approach may simplify image sharing, but it’s not always optimal because someone’s product preferences win out over someone else’s. The resulting lack of buy-in across the expanded entity then triggers tensions between radiologists, clinical departments and IT organizations. 

Anticipating the potential for such an unwanted scenario to unfold, it is essential to formulate a strategy to merge these systems while ensuring business continuity.

Every sound strategy begins with preparing the practices for data migration. A smart first step in this process is getting input from everyone who will need to work with or even near a new PACS. This means involving not only IT people, radiologists and technologists but also team members in scheduling, reception, billing and administration. Sometimes it’s smart to even engage stakeholders in other specialties. 

As part of the full migration strategy, each area should have representatives undergo a demo or, better yet, a training session on the various systems prior to selection, installation and implementation. Such early involvement of all stakeholders is critical for success. 

Let the Cloud Rain Interoperability on Stovepipes and Silos

If the decision is made to replace legacy PACS across the board, keep in mind that many radiologists today are considering flexible and cost-effective enterprise-wide solutions to address the limited scalability, storage capacity, computing power and image distribution options common to legacy PACS. 

As part of this evaluation, forward-thinking radiology leaders are examining cloud solutions, since the common Software as a Service (SaaS) model requires minimal capital outlay. This helps protect both initial and long-term investments. 

Interoperability is a familiar term used in these situations. According to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), this term is defined as “the extent to which systems and devices can exchange data and interpret that shared data. For two systems to be interoperable, they must be able to exchange data and subsequently present that data such that it can be understood by a user.”

Important to making this work is having the ability to share data across unaffiliated organizations. Increasingly, patients like to pick and choose where they go for any given care episode.

Other possibilities include cloud-based tools. These solutions are now being adopted to simplify and streamline the process of integrating data from different segments of the organization.