In what I believe is my 15th consecutive RSNA, I have a full schedule of business meetings, committee and board meetings, with some time for connecting with friends. In addition to the typical, semi-organized chaos, I am giving two talks.
Hope to see you all in Chicago.
Update: Voting is now closed. Integration Profiles selected by the IHE committees for development in the 2016/2017 development cycle:
What healthcare use cases do you want addressed? What are the biggest interoperability issues facing our community today?
Provide your input to the IHE integration development process by completing the survey. Simply rank the six proposed profiles. It take 10 seconds.
As the number of the PACS consolidation projects grow, I think it is important to explore some of the informatics concepts that need to be addressed to maximize the value of a consolidated PACS’ clinical functionality.
As mentioned in my recent MIIT talk, there are operational, financial and clinical goals that drive PACS consolidation projects. One of those reasons is to enable multi-facility diagnostic reading workflow: acquire anywhere and read anywhere in the enterprise.
One of the key informatics prerequisites of a successful PACS consolidation project is dealing with Patient Identities in a Consolidated Enterprise to establish patients’ longitudinal imaging record. Once that fundamental challenge is addressed, dealing with the normalization or mapping of the exam terminologies used by different RIS systems across the consolidated enterprise is the next critical informatics area to tackle. Often, PACS consolidation projects do not include the unification of the facility RIS, which forces the PACS to deal with multiple terminology domains.
In this series of the blog posts, I will examine this challenge in detail and describe the imaging informatics industry’s current capabilities to deal with it.
First of all, let’s define the problem and why it is important.
The anatomical and procedural information for a radiology exam is used by the PACS to primarily: 1) determine relevancy across patients’ historic studies; and 2) establish the correct display protocol for the PACS Workstation. As different ordering systems (EMR/RIS) may use different values to describe the same ordered procedure, the consolidated PACS will have to use a value normalization or mapping method to properly process the information.
The following diagram conceptually illustrates the difference between normalization and mapping methods.
This approach relies on keeping many-to-many translation tables where each term has a corresponding defined value under each terminology domain. This approach is feasible only with a very small number of values and terminology domains.
This methodology creates a “canonical” representation of each term and establishes a one-to-one relationship between each value in each terminology domain and the corresponding value under the “canonical” representation. This approach can accommodate a very large number of values and terminologies, as the translation from one terminology to another is always done through the canonical value.
In the next post, I will describe the imaging informatics use-cases that have to deal with this challenge.
SIIM 2016 is almost here. If you are attending this year’s Annual Meeting, you may find these sessions that I am chairing of interest.
Developing an Imaging Record Quality Policy
Thursday, June 30 | 1:15 pm – 2:45 pm
Portland Ballroom 256
Strategies and Tactics for Capturing and Sharing Images
Friday, July 1 | 8:00 am – 9:30 am
Portland Ballroom 256
Strategies for Dealing with Patient Identities in a Consolidated Enterprise
Friday, July 1 | 1:15 pm – 2:45 pm
Portland Ballroom 256
Basically, just park yourself in Portland Ballroom 256 and I will come to you.
I will also be participating in the:
Hackathon Project Showcase (#SIIMHacks)
Friday, July 1 | 9:45 am – 10:45 am | Portland Ballroom 254
I look forward to catching up with some old friends and making some new ones over some craft beer!
Genady Knizhnik (@genady_knizhnik) and I (@donkdennison) will be speaking at the 11th annual MIIT conference on Friday June 17th, 2016 in Hamilton, ON, Canada (Liuna Station, 360 James Street).
I am moderating a panel discussion in a session titled “Longitudinal Patient Imaging Record in a DIR” and presenting a talk on “Breast Tomosynthesis: Impact on IT Systems”.
Genady is presenting on “PACS Consolidation and Imaging Record Quality Policies”.
More information, including the complete program, is available here.
Register to attend here.
When I discuss industry trends with colleagues and clients, I find that we periodically touch on the topic of defining and realizing VNA and Enterprise Viewer (EV) projects’ return on investment (ROI). Our industry has made several attempts to develop an ROI calculator, which would typically encompass:
Often these calculations are tied to a specific project and not easily reused.
During our involvement in various VNA and EV projects, we observed an interesting pattern that can bring an additional perspective on the ROI discussion.
By the end of 2010, the vast majority of U.S. hospitals had installed a PACS solution. The bulk of the deployments took place during the 2005-2010 period, and many of those are still in place, bolstered by many upgrades and technology-refresh cycles since their initial installations. During that period, both the hardware and storage components of a PACS solution were often procured directly from the PACS vendors. This procurement approach allowed the vendors to enjoy significant Service and Maintenance Agreement (SMA) revenues that would cover not only their solution components but also any included third-party hardware and storage.
Since that procurement wave, many things have changed:
Also, PACS market saturation depreciated PACS vendors’ software license sales, resulting in SMA revenues becoming the key contributor to their top line.
All of these changes often created a tension between a hospital’s staff and its PACS vendor because the perceived value of the services delivered under the SMA contracts do not seem to warrant the high dollar cost. Besides tough negotiation tactics, a hospital has few practical tools at its disposal to change this dynamic. This is where well-thought-out VNA and EV projects may become extremely important in changing the negotiation power balance.
The technical and operational benefits of having a VNA take over a PACS Archive, EMR integration and sometimes even workflow components by the VNA and EV solutions are well documented and often result in the hospital’s reduced dependency on the existing PACS vendor.
Consequently, a hospital that implements VNA and EV solutions will be well-suited to renegotiate existing PACS SMA contracts to adequately reflect the provided service. The reduced SMA value can partially offset the cost of VNA and EV projects, thus contributing positively to the ROI calculation. Having said that, without a compelling event, such as an RFP to replace the existing PACS, the incumbent vendor will have little incentive to concede in the SMA renegotiations.
In order to successfully realize the above potential savings, it is important to understand what core functional areas of a PACS can be replaced by a VNA or an EV solution. Consider the following diagram:
| Impact on Workflow or External Systems | Replacement Complexity | Industry Ability to Replace | |
| Long-term Archiving and ILM | This functionality is typically not exposed to external systems and has relatively simple orchestration workflows | Low: Besides the need to keep the VNA copy of the study in sync with the one cached by the PACS, the archival and retrieval functionality is relatively straight-forward | Current state-of-the-art VNA solutions offer proven methodologies to take over this functional area from the PACS |
| Routing, Pre-fetching and Relevancy | This functional area may play an important role in orchestrating a departmental or an enterprise workflow | Moderate: Relevancy detection can potentially increase the relative complexity of study routing and pre-fetching, which are typically quite straightforward due to their transactional nature | The majority of the leading VNA solutions can adequately deliver this functionality, but their rule-definition flexibility coupled with their ability to express sophisticated relevancy rules (especially across multiple terminology domains), may vary |
| Acquisition and Quality Control (QC) Workflow Orchestration | This functionality has a major impact on the acquisition and reading workflow with a large number of 3rd party systems integrations | High: The large number of acquisition modalities will often have different associated configurations. Additionally, in large enterprises QC workflows could be very complex involving both automatic and manual activities. The effort to recreate all QC workflows, which were accumulated over the course of many years could be quite significant | The VNA systems’ ability to provide this functionality represents one of the major product differentiation areas among current vendors |
| Image Distribution and EMR Integration | An ability to provide access to images outside of the Radiology department is a critical component of a provider’s single patient record objective | Low: The need to provide access to images within multiple applications (e.g. EMR, portal) or stand-alone impose some security and integration challenges. Besides the privacy and security considerations, the rest of the deployment and integration activities are relatively straight forward. | Current state-of-the-art EV solutions offer proven methodologies to take over this functional area from PACS |
Although this post is primarily focused on SMA-related costs, the reduction of the PACS functional scope will also decrease the corresponding Professional Services expenses.
Working on an Enterprise Imaging project? Leave us a comment with your thoughts, or contact us.
This article, inflammatory headline aside, is spot on.
In what other industry are consumers provided less information about the cost of a product or service until after purchase?
Price transparency is the first step in allowing consumers to choose. And choice means market forces drive down costs and force providers to focus on efficiency (or go broke trying).
For more reading on healthcare financials, including Radiology reimbursement, read my past blog posts here, here, here, and here.
In my last post, we explored the current state-of-the-art of the Enterprise Imaging (EI) industry. In this post, I will zoom in on storing and managing non-DICOM images and videos. This can be ambiguous and may confuse providers who are trying to procure an EI solution. It also results in different schools of thought among vendors.
Currently, EI content can be stored and managed in one of the following formats:
The following diagram depicts the main steps that take place during information capture activity for each method.
All of the above methods have corresponding pros and cons, which leads to the current divergence of opinions regarding the best option to use. Having said that, it is clear that, irrespective of the chosen method, there is a need to properly collect and manage patient, administrative and clinical context (aka metadata) for the acquired EI content.
Each of the above methods offer different levels of metadata rigidity and extensibility which impact the interoperability:
There are two overarching clinical reasons to capture EI content:
As the following diagram suggests, the way EI content is stored is less important then the flexibility of an EI solution’s “Capture” and “Discovery and Access” components, because it is hidden behind those interfaces.
It seems that, currently, there is no single answer for the best EI content format given the informatics complexity of healthcare provider’s enterprises. In order to adapt and compete, vendors will be pressured to support multiple inbound and outbound methods (such as FHIR, DICOM, DICOMWeb, XDS, proprietary APIs, etc.) and only time will tell which approach will become a de-facto standard.
Working on an Enterprise Imaging project? Leave us a comment with your thoughts, or contact us.
This article interviews several people in the trenches, and on the front lines, of imaging IT planning, integration and management in today’s Consolidated Enterprise.
Critical to success are:
Organizations that prepare for consolidation and invest effort in these areas will survive—and even thrive—in the never ending healthcare provider merger and acquisition race.
Based on discussions with colleagues and our clients, Enterprise Imaging is becoming an integral part of U.S. Hospital IT Consolidated Clinical Record strategies.
HIMSS-SIIM Enterprise Imaging Workgroup‘s current working definition of Enterprise Imaging is as following:
Despite the attention from vendors, industry focus, and provider demand, this market space is still in its early stages of development. There are two main reasons: 1) the scope of the problem domain is still being defined; and 2) the vendor community is still working out the best practices and optimal technical approaches.
Moreover, the number of the departments that generate Enterprise Imaging content and that have their own departmental workflows is quite large.
This results in significant confusion on the provider side who are left to navigate a myriad of perspectives expressed by the imaging informatics industry. There are on-going initiatives that are currently working on demystifying the field of Enterprise Imaging. For example, the recent SIIM Webinar delivered by Dr. Towbin from Cincinnati Children’s, provides a very thorough analysis of the problem domain.
In conversations with vendors and providers, we have compiled several observations that might benefit the imaging informatics community.
The Right Approach
In the SIIM 2015 Opening General Session presentation, Don Dennison presented the following slide titled “Enterprise Image Management: Making the Right Choice”
With the various systems in place to manage patient record data, there is often debate as to which enterprise system is best suited to offer Enterprise Imaging services.
At the moment, there is no obvious answer to the question presented by the slide. Besides the technical capabilities of the systems, the provider’s internal IT capabilities, capacity and policies can significantly influence the decision. At some organizations, where the Imaging Informatics Team plays a prominent IT role, the choice could be the VNA, while at others, where the Enterprise IT team takes the lead, the EMR or ECM is often chosen.
The Right Functionality
During RSNA 2015, we conducted a study to identify the state-of-the-art of Enterprise Imaging technology, including methods of acquisition, management, and distribution of non-DICOM images. The following table summarizes our findings.
| Image / Video Acquisition | |
| Ability to capture from mobile devices | The majority of current vendors opted for native applications to provide better user experience and tighter security controls. Still, image capture is the prevailing capability, with video acquisition capabilities lagging behind. Some vendors offer integration with leading EMRs’ mobile applications. |
| Ability to capture from visible light cameras | The ability to manually (i.e. file browse, drag & drop, etc.) upload both videos and images is a commodity. Automatic ingestion, on other hand, varies significantly from vendor to vendor. Most vendors offer proprietary integration frameworks, but their comprehensiveness and real-life integration experience is very different from one to another. |
| Ability to capture from different scopes | Most of the vendors leverage third party hardware devices to integrate with digital or analog video sources real-time. |
| Acquisition Workflow | |
| Order-based Workflow | DICOM Modality Worklist (DMWL) SCU support, as well as the ability to generate or receive order information, are available in most vendor’s applications. Context-based launch of the capture application is also a well understood and supported functionality. Many of the vendors mimic an order-based workflow (i.e. create the Accession Number) for the acquisitions that are not scheduled. The main challenge with this approach is to determine the correct method to feed the created information back to the EMR (e.g. often called an “unsolicited result”, which may not be supported at the site). |
| Encounter-based Workflow | Some vendors, originating from the Diagnostic Imaging space, struggle with native Encounter-based workflow support. On many occasions, departmental visit/encounter information, supplied in HL7 messages from the EMR, is sufficient to build specific acquisition worklists for different service lines. |
| Scenarios where information services are not available | Most of the vendors offer the ability to manually create patient and procedure information. The difference lies in whether all or just a sub-set of capturing methods (e.g. mobile vs. desktop) support that functionality. |
| Patient identity management | Standards-based methods to discover or receive patient information is widely supported, while the support for proprietary methods to connect to patient information sources varies from vendor to vendor. |
| Ability to Edit Images/Videos | |
| Editing Tools | Most of the vendors rely on an installed Windows OS client application to edit (e.g. crop) acquired images or videos as part of the manual upload process (e.g. drag & drop). Selected vendors also allow static image editing only (i.e. no video) during the mobile capture. |
| Images | An ability to associate different types of metadata (including notes) is supported by the majority of the vendors. Also, basic manipulation of the acquired images such as image deletion, markups and annotation, which are stored as overlay objects associated with the acquired images is common. Only selected vendors are capable of calibrating images on-the-fly by using recognizable objects of known size embedded in the image. |
| Videos | A flexible and comprehensive ability to associate different types of metadata (including notes and keywords) is supported by the majority of the vendors. Most of the vendors have very limited (if at all) video editing and capturing capabilities and rely on third party providers. |
| Viewer | |
| Current state | The solutions typically consist of the following viewers:
|
| Privacy and Security | |
| Current state | Most of the vendors offer a range of methods to ensure PHI protection such as:
|
| Reporting | |
| Current state | The most prevalent approach is to rely on an external system, such as the EMR or specialty-specific reporting application, to create and manage reports. |
| Record Management | |
| Current state | Most of the vendors opt for managing image and videos in their native format, while converting the content on-the-fly for standards-based communication with external systems. |
Conclusion
It seems that Enterprise Imaging is going to rapidly evolve and we are eager to see how our clients, and providers in general, will benefit from these changes.
Working on an Enterprise Imaging project? Leave us a comment with your thoughts, or contact us.
Don K Dennison 