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.
Medical imaging under pressure
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Select a chapter below to continue.
What is ‘enterprise imaging’?
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Enterprise imaging: timely benefits motivating adoption
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Why cloud?
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There’s cloud … and then there’s cloud
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Disciplined migration: less risk, more reward
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Lessons from financial services
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Key technical and financial considerations
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Taking the next step
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Unify the Patient Journey With a Robust Digital Patient Engagement and Revenue Cycle Strategy.
Read the other e-books in the series:
As the role of imaging in medical diagnosis and treatment expands, more clinicians require easier and faster access to more images. In fact, NHS recorded 8,456,190 more imaging actions in 2019–2020 than it did in 2012–2013. Unfortunately, many organisations still process their imaging in functional silos using multiple legacy on-premises systems. This fragmented environment results in workflow bottlenecks and missed clinical opportunities that have multiple — and potentially severe — adverse impacts on your organisation’s performance. Wait times for nuclear imaging, for example, increased more than 36% between 2013–2014 and 2019–2020. These adverse impacts will only worsen as imaging workflows expand and diversify. Plus, as pandemic conditions have revealed, your organisation must be able to respond to rapidly growing demand for imaging acquisition and reading in geographically dispersed non-acute settings.
Fortunately, there is a better way for healthcare providers to manage their diverse imaging capabilities and optimise their complex imaging workflows. This much-needed alternative is known as “enterprise imaging.” Enterprise imaging enables organisations like yours to take a unified and rationalised approach to your entire portfolio of imaging capabilities and processes — including the capture, indexing, storage, distribution, viewing, exchange, notation, and analysis of all your imaging and multimedia.
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.
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.
“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.
Leaders at healthcare organisations will each approach cloud deployment for enterprise imaging in a slightly different way depending on the unique context of the organisation’s needs, readiness for migration, and availability of capital and resources. Designing a staged, incremental road map from your current imaging portfolio to a target state enables you to optimally fulfil your organisation’s specific operational and economic objectives. In fact, those objectives may lead you to target a goal that is not cloud only — but instead entails a hybrid combination of on-premises and cloud, so that you situate each component of your end-to-end imaging workflows where it makes the most functional and financial sense.
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.
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:
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.).
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Yes, I'd like to learn more about Change Healthcare's enterprise imaging solutions for an upcoming enterprise imaging RFP
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1. Imaging action decreased in 2020/21 due to COVID-19. Source: Diagnostic Imaging Dataset Annual Statistical Release 2020/21
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 second e-book in this series. Reach out to one of our expert enterprise imaging consultants:
