This e-book is based on research conducted by and published in a white paper from Signify Research.
Learn how to measure the return on investment of moving your enterprise imaging to the cloud.
Enterprise imaging in the cloud: an inevitable migration
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Select a chapter below to continue.
Compelling benefits for an imaging-intensive future
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Cloud benefits: better care
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Cloud benefits: operational effectiveness
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Cloud benefits: superior cybersecurity
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Cloud benefits: reduced cost of imaging ownership
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Cloud benefits: cost predictability
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Cloud benefits: getting more value from imaging data
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Cloud benefits: future-ready enterprise imaginge
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Unify the Patient Journey With a Robust Digital Patient Engagement and Revenue Cycle Strategy.
Taking the next step
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EI in the cloud: migration considerations
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Read the other e-books in the series:
In the first e-book of this series, we explored how healthcare providers are finding that their siloed on-premise imaging systems cannot adequately support their relentlessly expanding use of medical imaging. Fragmented imaging environments cannot respond to the ever-growing demand for imaging access across acute, outpatient, and remote locations. Legacy systems also increase exposure to security risks, add cost, and can make governance complex. That’s why the move to the cloud is inevitable. With enterprise imaging in the cloud, you can unify and rationalise your entire portfolio of imaging capabilities and processes — including capture, indexing, storage, distribution, viewing, exchange, notation, and analysis.
Complexity
Security
Access
Cost
Scale
Improved care through improved collaboration and analysis. Better cybersecurity through risk reduction. Time savings for clinicians, clerical staff, and administrators. Greater value for clinicians and population health programs. Reduced cost of imaging ownership. Predictability of operating costs. Future-readiness for evolving imaging technology.
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The cloud offers numerous compelling benefits to healthcare organisations as they make more extensive use of an ever-expanding set of imaging technologies and as they seek to leverage their imaging assets to provide better care to more patients across a wider range of clinical settings. Those benefits support:
Network upgrades to minimise latency between your facilities and your cloud providers. IT staff skill sets needed for implementation, integration, and maintenance of cloud-based enterprise imaging. Relevant regulatory mandates. Special functional requirements (such as advanced visualisation or research-level analytics). Impacts on data centre capacity. Redundancy requirements for operational continuity. Impacts on other key systems (administration, case management, patient communications, etc.).
Start compiling specifications for your road map collaboratively with a multidisciplinary team that includes IT, clinicians, finance, administration, and risk management. Considerations to incorporate in your planning include:
According to a white paper from Signify Research, three key benefits are driving the adoption of enterprise imaging by healthcare providers facing today’s price and performance pressures.
Faster individual and collaborative assessment of imaging by clinical stakeholders across all locations. Streamlined adoption and integration of additional imaging capabilities and new imaging technologies into the enterprise environment. Enhanced ability to implement compute-intensive medical imaging analytics, including evolving AI solutions.
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Improvements to patient care are at the heart of the business case for enterprise imaging in the cloud. That’s why any decision to adopt cloud-based enterprise imaging should factor in the significant benefits to clinical care, including:
The cloud has tremendous potential when it comes to unifying diverse systems into a unified enterprise imaging environment. In fact, it is only through a cloud architecture that healthcare organisations can achieve anytime, anywhere access with adaptable on-demand scalability.
Less clinician time lost waiting for access to images, searching for related files, waiting for peers to access and review images, and running analytics. Less clerical staff time spent hunting down and collecting the multiple imaging files associated with a single patient case. Less administrative staff time spent managing access permissions and responding to stakeholder issues such as slow performance or unavailable files.
With enterprise imaging in the cloud, you can reliably predict a variety of quantifiable operational benefits, including:
“Cloud,” it should be noted, is a very broad term that imaging vendors can use to refer to all kinds of architectures. It’s important for decision-makers to carefully consider the cloud-related capabilities made by any potential partners before engaging with them to facilitate moving imaging to the cloud. In particular, it is useful to distinguish between systems that are cloud enabled and those that are truly cloud native.
Endpoint protection. Protection of imaging applications. Remote access controls. Adversarial penetration testing to proactively discover potential vulnerabilities.
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Defending a complex on-premises IT infrastructure can be a daunting, expensive task. It also can be extremely difficult for individual organisations to recruit and retain skilled cybersecurity professionals. The economics of cybersecurity for cloud providers are much more conducive to state-of-the-art protection and staffing. That’s why cloud providers have invested billions to address all aspects of imaging security, including:
Cloud providers’ economies of scale also allow for stronger failover capabilities to ensure continuity of operations in the event of a ransomware attack, natural disaster, or other disruption.
Consolidating the fragmented IT infrastructure that currently supports your imaging management and workflows into a unified cloud environment. Leveraging the economies of scale offered by cloud providers. Reducing the IT staff head count required for managing on-premises infrastructure.
While the primary goal of moving enterprise imaging to the cloud is to help improve clinical workflows and patient care, costs are obviously a principal factor in any organisation’s long-term strategy. By leveraging the cloud, you can substantially reduce your organisation’s ongoing imaging technology ownership costs by:
When it comes to cloud migration, healthcare providers may find the experience of the financial services sector instructive. After all, financial services firms have numerous attributes in common with healthcare providers, including stewardship of highly sensitive data, the imperative of institutional integrity, intensive interaction with peer organisations, and significant government regulation. Yet despite similar confidentiality challenges and rigorous regulation, cloud adoption in the financial services sector has proliferated greatly in the last decade. And the benefits to financial services firms have been significant, as cloud has helped them deliver a broader range of high-value offerings to their clientele while keeping headcount and operational costs under control. All this has been accomplished through disciplined migration that started with private cloud before moving to public cloud—and that continues to embrace the practicalities of hybrid, purpose-driven provisioning.
With on-premises IT infrastructure, organisations must constantly attempt to predict how much capacity they will need and then overbuild in anticipation of that future capacity requirement. The result is an inefficient “step function” capital spend that can either waste budget on excess capacity or undermine performance with inadequate capacity. With cloud, your monthly spend is continuously aligned with your actual needs/consumption; so you can better avoid overspending while consistently maintaining your performance goals for speed of access and analysis.
Traditional on-premises infrastructure requires periodic “step function” capital investments that inherently result in either overspending or inadequate capacity. Cloud infrastructure, in marked contrast, keeps both capacity and operational spending tightly aligned with actual demand.
Imaging data can not only help improve the quality and efficiency of clinical care, it also can inform new population health strategies — particularly as your organisation adopts more advanced analytical tools. This value is exemplified by the recent work of associations such as RSNA and SIIM on building industry and provider consortiums to drive the democratisation of imaging data through the creation, adoption, and incentivised use of standards-based cloud exchange and data harmonisation. The cloud offers significant advantages in this regard, since it facilitates the consolidation, scaling, analysis, and exchange of your imaging data sets.
CLINICAL TEAMS
ENTERPRISE IMAGING ANALYTICS
Cloud benefits: future-ready enterprise imaging
Multidisciplinary care, which will require “data liquidity” across clinical silos. Greater transparency of care, which will require that patients be given easy, portal-based access to imaging and analyses. Teleradiology, which will require imaging workflow across broader networks. Next-generation analytics, which will require imaging “data lakes” with rich metadata.
Imaging will likely play a major role in the future of healthcare, in combination with genomics, smart devices, AI, and other advances in technology. Enterprise imaging in the cloud can help you successfully participate in this technology-centric future by delivering the adaptability necessary to participate in emerging trends such as:
This future may seem a long way off when you’re facing immediate challenges of extended accessibility and better cost management, but it’s important to keep in mind how your near-term investments in cloud-based enterprise imaging can pay off tremendously in the mid- and long-term.
Much of your migration planning and execution will focus on your imaging applications and cloud infrastructure. Data governance, however, should also be a key consideration in your migration. Data ownership Regardless of how you transition to the cloud, it’s essential that any agreement you make with a cloud provider includes robust terms regarding privacy policies and third-party use of PHI data. Data integration To get maximum value from your newly unified pool of enterprise imaging data, you’ll need to establish data access rules that will both streamline current integrations and facilitate future requirements of research, precision medicine, and/or other anticipated technology initiatives. Data hygiene The value your organisation reaps from analytics and AI will be highly contingent on the quality of your imaging data. Strong enterprise-wide data and metadata quality controls should thus be an intrinsic component of your move to the cloud.
Yes, I'd like to learn more about Change Healthcare's enterprise imaging solutions for an upcoming enterprise imaging RFP
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Enterprise imaging can significantly benefit your clinical and administrative staff, your associated clinicians, your IT team, and most of all your patients. Take the next step in planning a successful journey by building your multidisciplinary enterprise imaging road map planning team. Here are the next steps you can take to learn more:
I'm not actively working on an enterprise imaging RFP but would be interested in Change Healthcare's help with a future road map
Download Signify Research’s white paper on enterprise imaging/cloud migration. Keep learning about enterprise imaging in the cloud by viewing the third e-book in this series. Reach out to one of our expert enterprise imaging consultants:
