Big-name technology company leaders urge radiologists to ‘Ditch the Disk’
Radiologists working in big-name tech companies are joining the bandwagon to urge their peers in medicine to say goodbye to CDs in their regular caregiving routine.
Those include Salesforce Chief Medical Officer Ashwini Zenooz, MD, and Michael Muelly, MD, a radiologist who recently left Google Cloud. “Ditch the Disk,” as the group they’re part of is called, is aimed at helping the specialty abandon this old school means of storing images, CNBC reported Feb. 16.
“We talk a lot about interoperability when it comes to clinical data from electronic health records, but we often forget about imaging," Muelly told the website.
The group is now meeting at least quarterly to discuss how radiology and the rest of healthcare can begin this transition away from CD-ROMs. The goal, Zenooz added, is to eventually make transmitting images “as easy as sharing a text message on a phone.” As part of the push, Ditch the Disk is urging the industry to support a new application programming interface that makes it easier for patients to authorize clinicians to transfer their images, the report noted.
The American College of Radiology’s Informatics Commission first established the #DitchtheDisk Task Force in conjunction with RSNA back in 2018. Other big names in medicine such as Penn and Stanford have also tuned into the cause, Zenooz added. She further explored the task force in a piece she penned for Becker’s this week.
Read more about Ditch the Disk below:
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.