Medical Imaging

Apps for Health 2013 at Mohawk College

dondennison Healthcare IT , , , , , , , , , ,

Mohawk1

I had heard good things about this one-day conference, so I decided to take the drive down to Hamilton, ON to check it out. I am glad I did.

Apps for Health has 3 tracks. One focused on Technology, one on Health, and another on Education. They also had keynote speakers to open and close the day of sessions.

To be honest, I was fearing that the recurring trend was going to go something like this: “Healthcare is broken! I love the App Store! Why can’t we get more apps faster!?!” …but the speakers were polished and came with insight and data.

Topics ranged from the needs for a “prescription” for a set of apps for different patient conditions, different levels of safety and risk that apps represent (for physicians and patients), regulatory challenges, privacy, security, and development approaches.

A collection of small and not-so-small vendors had table top displays set up, and attendees (and students) seemed to be routinely interacting with the vendor staff.

Having never been to Mohawk college before, I have to admit that I was quite impressed with the facilities. The buildings are very modern. Everywhere you look, you see technology—on the walls, in the classrooms, in the library, in the hands of the students …everywhere.

One of the more enjoyable parts of my excursion to The Hammer (nickname for Hamilton), was a tour of the Mohawk MEDIC lab. The students demonstrated a complete workflow of a patient’s journey through a referral from her family doctor, to an exam with a specialist (an allergist), and an unfortunate skiing accident in a remote area.

They showed how an EMR—in this case, the open source OSCAR EMR—could accept the referral and share it with the specialist by using an IHE XDS infrastructure. They then showed how the specialist could perform the exam and share the results back to the EMR using the same methods. They also showed the use of mobile technology by EMT and ER staff to review the patient’s records before administering treatment, thus avoiding a potential adverse incident (the allergist report found her allergic to penicillin and other drugs).

Mohawk is serving its students well. They are not only learning about the real world challenges facing healthcare, they are learning about how to build and apply open solutions, and use the latest tools to do it. And they are doing it in a fantastic facility. If you know someone thinking of going there, at least go for the tour—you won’t regret it.

Review of Stage 2 Meaningful Use Test Procedure for Image Results …and other MU tests

dondennison Healthcare IT , , , , , ,

I was just checking out the draft test procedure (PDF) for access of image results under Meaningful Use stage 2, §170.314 (a)(12).

This is the test that vendors seeking certification of their EHR products must complete and provide evidence of passing.

Often, EHR vendors get imaging wrong, but I think the authors of the test procedure got it mostly right. At least in terms of the requirements.

Essentially, the EHR must allow an authenticated and authorized user to be able to discover that exam images for a patient are available, and access the images (and associated “narrative”) in the EHR, or integrated systems, without requiring the user to re-authenticate, or search for the patient or exam.

Said another way, the system must have some form of Single Sign On (SSO) with the imaging system (or subsystem, if part of the EHR), and share the existing patient and exam context from the EHR to the imaging system.

A couple of comments…

  • I have seen SSO done well and poorly (read as: insecurely) between EHRs and imaging systems. When done poorly, it if often due to technical limitations in the EHR and/or imaging systems. Or, it is simply because the integration and/or IT staff lack the knowledge or effort to do it right (read as: securely). I have found that HIE and portal vendors and enterprise viewers are generally better equipped to properly handle SSO than EHR and PACS products (probably because they are generally based on newer technology and are often deployed in multi-facility environments that demand interoperability).
  • Integration from the EHR to a patient folder or specific exam has been around since PACS was first launched from an EHR well over a decade ago. What often gets lost is that users often want to compare exams side-by-side (e.g. pre-op and post-op). So, the imaging system may need to expand the context beyond a specific exam to allow this. As long as EHRs keep behaving like filing cabinets, the imaging viewer vendors will have to solve this.
  • The typical method of having an EHR be aware that an exam’s images are available for viewing is to push a modified HL7 ORU message, containing info about the exam, from the image manager to the EHR. The EHR then normally parses the info and uses it, along with a URL (or similar) string template, to create a context-sensitive link that can launch the viewer and present the desired exam. Some EHR can provide multiple exam identifiers, when the imaging viewer supports it, to show more than one exam in a single view. More modern methods for an EHR to discover the availability of an exam’s images is to use a REST-based query method, much like defined in DICOM‘s QIDO-RS (Query based on ID for DICOM Objects by RESTful Services) standard (in development).
  • An additional note on the URL to launch the viewer in context mentioned above: check out IHE’s work on the new integration profile Invoke Image Display (IID).

Some other test procedures that could be related to imaging…

  • Here (PDF) is the test procedure on authentication, access control, and authorization. And here is one on automatic log-off. I would have liked to see some requirements for SSO, like Kerberos or OAuth.
  • This test procedure on integrity requires a hash to be calculated and validated. This may (should) also be required for image exchange.
  • For the requirement for emergency access, if the imaging system does not allow the EHR to securely manage this (this can be done, by the way), the imaging system may have to also provide an emergency access override function (which means that the unique identity of the user had better have been passed securely to the imaging system, or it will have no idea to whom it is granting access).

Article – MRI Payment Cuts Having Dramatic Effect on Radiology Groups

dondennison Financials , ,

Last month, I posted about reimbursement cuts to two popular MRI exams.

In this article, the impact of these changes to Radiology groups are explained fairly clearly. Worth a read if you make your living (directly or indirectly) from Radiology services reimbursement.

Article – Radiology Staffing: How to Do More with Less

dondennison Radiology , , , ,

A lot of people are talking about using analytics to make operational improvements (read as: lowering costs while improving quality of service), but this article describes some specific ways to do this within a Radiology practice.

Examples (from the article)…

  • Use actual procedure data to determine the specialty needed, as well as the number of staff needed in each facility/location. It also helps determine if full-time or part-time staff are needed.
  • Adapt the daily shift schedule based on hourly exam volume peaks.

The article also explains how technology is used to improve efficiency…

  • Cloud based image sharing, integrated with PACS, to distribute reading of exams among distributed Radiologists.
  • Shared worklist across facilities

Article – CPOE use can reduce unneeded CT scans

dondennison Radiology , , ,

Not a mind-blowing revelation, but when doctors are told that the information they want already exists, they don’t order more tests (usually).

And while the results of the study summarized in this article reflect only a small decrease in new CT exams being ordered (“physicians canceled orders after receiving the alerts about 6 percent of the time, making for a net cancellation of 1.7 percent of studies. In a control group, physicians canceled only .9 percent of alerts.”), every bit counts.

And it reduces the radiation the patient receives, as well as helps keep the Radiology schedule free for really important exams.

A goal to simply reduce the number of exams performed is misguided. This blog post summarizes a proposed model to help separate the necessary from unnecessary exams.

Article – Report Offers System to Separate Useful and Wasteful Imaging

dondennison Radiology ,

In this article, the authors describe a simple classification system for defining different types of additional imaging exams. Too often, additional imaging is deemed wasteful, so having a model to separate the necessary from unnecessary is a good idea.

The model excerpted from the article…

  • A supplemental image — many of which are medically necessary — would occur during the same clinical encounter but utilize a different modality, such as a non-contrast CT scan and a renal ultrasound to identify kidney stones.
  • Duplicative images involve the same modality during the same or subsequent clinical session. These images are taken for a variety of reasons, including the unavailability of previous scans or a change in the patient’s condition.
  • Follow-up imaging can involve the same or different modalities during later clinical meetings, such as repeated imaging in cancer patients to verify there’s been no relapse of disease.
  • Unrelated imaging — scanning of the same body area with any modality — is often an unforeseen event. For example, in its paper, HPI discussed unrelated imaging in a woman who had CT screenings for breast cancer staging two weeks prior to a car accident that prompted identical scans.

Article – Enterprise Imaging: Beyond Cloud-based Image Sharing

dondennison Healthcare IT , , , , , ,

Read this, seriously.

Some thoughts…

  • I agree with most of what the article covers. I believe that Radiologists will be more consultant than owner of the Enterprise Imaging (EI) platform.
  • One topic that is not covered is the informatics around the metadata to collect at the time of capture. DICOM and IHE provide guidance as to what metadata we want to capture and include when doing a CT exam, but what needs to be captured when a clinical images are captured and stored is far less defined (though this will evolve as EI is adopted). Hopefully, we can start defining this by using some standard lexicons and codes (like SNOMED CT), as these are more mature now than when we started defining metadata values for traditional radiology modalities.
  • There needs to be close attention paid to the indexing of metadata in the EMR and the EI platform; more than is traditionally done when doing a basic EMR and PACS viewer integration. If an HIE is in place or planned, this also needs to be considered. Not all systems will be capable of managing all the desired metadata (including unique identifiers).
  • The EI platform should be considered a component of the EMR and managed as such–don’t put EI in your radiology PACS; just don’t.
  • We need to develop EI professionals through education and shared experiences, if we want to succeed. I may be biased, but I believe that SIIM is one of the organizations well-positioned to provide this. Check out my two-part blog post (part 1, part 2) on the SIIM web site.

Article – MRI Use Dropped Since 2008

dondennison Radiology ,

MRI Use Dropped Since 2008

Source: Researchers from Thomas Jefferson University Hospital

Key stats…

  • 1998-2008 – Compound annual growth rate of 10 percent
  • 2009-2010 – Decrease of 3.1 percent
  • 2010 – 37.3% of all MRI exams are of the head

Article – MITA: Obama Budget’s Imaging Provisions Threaten New Medical Technology Development and Patient Care

dondennison Policy , ,

The medical device manufacturers’ industry association, MITA, says Obama Budget’s Imaging Provisions Threaten New Medical Technology Development and Patient Care.

Key notes…

  • President Obama’s proposed 2014 budget …includes a recommendation for a prior authorization system through for-profit radiology benefit managers (RBMs).
  • Several recent independent analyses have shown a decline in utilization of imaging technologies. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission’s (MedPAC) annual report to Congress in March 2012 confirmed that imaging services fell by 2.5 percent in 2010, while non-imaging utilization increased 2 percent. These data are consistent with an analysis commissioned by MITA which found that Medicare spending per beneficiary in the field has dropped 13.2 percent since 2006 and imaging utilization declined by 3 percent. This contrasts markedly with the overall Medicare program, in which spending per beneficiary increased by 20 percent and non-imaging utilization rose by 2 percent.

Get Moving – New Kinect SDK from Microsoft

dondennison Technology , ,

Using a Microsoft Kinect (motion, voice) as a healthcare application interface input (e.g. navigating images without touching a computer in the operating room) made a lot of press, but those folks that actually developed for it found the initial device release lacking an a mature API for PC application developers. Microsoft has since released a software developer kit (SDK), but it still required extra coding to have the device recognize desirable gestures. An update to the SDK was recently released and it adds several new gestures that can be recognized and made available to application developers through the SDK.

Check it out.

So, for those many Rads that played the clip from Minority Report (where Tom Cruise interacts with images and video by moving his hands around) during their talks at SIIM and elsewhere, we are one step closer to realizing your dream. 🙂 Though, do try and wave your arms around for a 4 to 8 hour workday and let me know how it goes—eye fatigue will be the least of your worries, my friends.