Time for a multi-disciplinary image strategy
Current trends in healthcare call for an image handling strategy for all medical disciplines. Images constitute an important decision support with a huge cost-savings potential; when handled efficiently, the gains become even clearer.
At County Södermanland Hospitals in Sweden, Cecilia Halvardson, Manager healthcare systems at the IT department, and her team recently decided to implement an enterprise-wide solution for non-radiology images. Image Mirror interviewed her to find out what the benefits are.
“We always strive to build an efficient workflow around the patient, from when treatment begins to when it’s completed. Images are taken within a large number of disciplines, but it’s only in the radiology department that most hospitals and clinics have a common system for storing and handling them. We wanted to increase transparency between different departments and avoid the problem of having images stored in several different systems or in the physicians’ computers, says Cecilia Halvardson.
What are the gains?
We saw there were significant gains, both from the clinician’s perspective and from a patient perspective. The clinical gains are obvious – providing images together with patient data completes the patient history and makes it easier to reach the correct conclusion. For the patient, the availability of images may save him or her, and the taxpayer, an additional visit to the hospital. After all, in many cases an image provides enough information for a specialist to assess if it’s necessary to see the patient. With a good enterprise-wide system for image handling, this possibility can be used more than it is today. And it may actually increase the number of images taken within healthcare.”
How will this impact processes within healthcare?
“I believe we will see processes become more oriented towards the patient’s journey through healthcare, rather than focused on specific disciplines or departments. This will become even more important due to demographic trends. Many elderly have multiple diagnoses that require treatment, but it simply isn’t economically viable to send them to different departments or clinics. Taking care of the ‘whole patient’ will become the only rational way to provide healthcare. In this scenario, enterprise-wide availability of images from any discipline will be critical.
How will this trend affect the healthcare system overall?
A patient-oriented process will require a new mindset among healthcare personnel. They have to understand their place in the healthcare chain rather than in a specific department or within a given specialty. Enterprise-wide image handling requires standardized processes. When do we take images? How? What equipment should we use? This will be especially challenging for departments where images have not been a part of the regular workflow before, such as primary care.
And ethically, how do we handle images that reveal the patient’s identity? We need to keep in mind that ethical issues will arise as we include new image types into a shared system. We also need to pay special attention to photographs that reveal a patient’s identity in a way that lab or radiology images don’t.
What effect will this have on budgetary issues?
In many cases, the gains do not arise where the effort/investment is made. For example, if a patient comes to his family doctor with a birthmark, the doctor can either refer him/her directly to a dermatology department for investigation or take a picture of the birthmark and refer the dermatologist to the photo for assessment. For the family doctor, it requires an extra effort to take the picture and enter it into the image handling system. For him/her it might be simpler to just refer the patient. But from the patient’s and the taxpayer’s point of view it is better to know if the birthmark requires treatment or not at this point, as it may prevent a costly and unnecessary visit to the hospital. Gains will outweigh costs, but as they arise at different points in the healthcare chain, everyone involved should adopt a holistic view of the patient in order to realize what the extra effort is worth.
