by
Nancy Ryerson, Staff Writer | February 06, 2013
From the January/February 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
RIS technology is also helping facilities break through the last bastions of paperwork and create a truly paperless office. Agfa, for example, offers a work list in its RIS sign that can be used on an iPad or other tablet for the forms technologists and patients must sign.
“’Paperless’ has been the buzzword for 10 years, but it’s been almost impossible to do that when the patient has to sign things,” says Tara Vail, head of Agfa’s U.S. RIS/PACS division. “This really allows facilities to go paperless.”
RIS has also begun to join the national trend toward cumulative dose tracking. Last year, Carestream’s RIS introduced the storage and tracking of radiation dose information.
“In the future we will be able to allow physicists at user sites to enter formulas that can be used to calculate dose and ultimately will enable tracking cumulative dose for each patient,” says Cristine Kao, Carestream’s global marketing manager, health care IT solutions.
iPaxera, the Paxeramed mobile viewer
For PACS, cloud cover remains spotty
To borrow a line from Joni Mitchell, customers have had a chance to look at the “cloud” from both sides, now. Vendors say customers now have a better understanding of what the cloud, a remote storage and viewing option delivered over the Internet, can offer. However, “cloud PACS,” in which PACS applications are hosted in the cloud, have not gained as much traction as what was once predicted. In 2012, cloud-based PACS accounted for only 0.6 percent of PACS, even less than the forecasted 1.3 percent.
“I know it’s the push, but when the rubber hits the road, I don’t think it’s feasible to get rid of on-site forever,” says Tyler Harris, vice president of clinical solutions at PACS vendor Novarad. “We still have an on-site archive, even with the cloud-based archive. That way, they’re pulling their images from the local server, and then they have the cloud-based features for off-site archiving and some of the critical archives.”
That holds true especially for rural facilities or facilities in countries with less reliable Internet access.
“Many of our accounts are ones in rural areas and they do not find yet that they have complete reliability on their Internet connections,” says Connect Imaging’s Manly. “So when set up something for an account, we have a localized server that can provide all of their needs. That way if they lose Internet, which apparently they do periodically, they have everything they need.”
