At the big show in Orlando, HIMSS Analytics introduced a way for hospitals and health systems to track progress while moving to an enterprise imaging environment.

Called the Digital Imaging Adoption Model (DIAM), the eight-stage model was created with the help of the Society of Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM), the European Society of Radiology (ESR) and the European Society of Medical Imaging Informatics (EUSOMII).

Kim Garriott, a principal consultant for healthcare strategies at Logicalis who serves as the chair of the HIMSS Analytics Digital Imaging Adoption Model Development Team, noted during a presentation on DIAM at HIMSS 2019 that by 2020, healthcare data will amount to 2.3 zettabytes, with 70 percent of that comprising clinical imaging.

“I think it’s pretty clear we can’t ignore the impact of digital imaging that is taking place across our healthcare organizations,” Garriott told the group gathered for the talk.

Garriott explained that as the model progresses, organizations need to understand how imaging is produced and consumed in at least three service areas, be able to see images in their “silos”, and have an enterprisewide strategy for how to manage all of those images, ensuring that acquisition is secure and that the data associated with the images can be relevantly presented in the EHR.

“By the time you get to Stage 4, we expect to have a central imaging repository where all images are made available through one viewer to your end user,” Garriott said. “So we expect that those individual silos of image viewing, or image access, will be collapsed, and we’ll have a unified viewing experience for our clinicians and our patients.

“As you move to the later stages of the model, then we start talking about how to enable analytics, how to enable precision medicine, how to enable augmented intelligence, and as you follow that ladder, it will help to ensure that your data is at the right level of integrity for those types of actions to occur,” Garriott said. “So really what it’s about is ultimately leveraging all of this myriad imaging data for the betterment of the health of our patients.”

DIAM is similar to adoption models that HIMSS Analytics has also developed for electronic medical records, technology infrastructure and analytics.

“We can help you understand, what is enterprise imaging, we help you to communicate through the levels of leadership at your organization that may not understand the value,” Garriott said. “It also helps you then measure, and know what to measure, as you go through the survey process, and what your capabilities are in each of the areas of the survey, and that leads to learning. … It’s an absolutely invaluable road map for you on this journey.”

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