Viewpoint: Helping hospitals manage medical imaging
PublicTechnology.net, 24/02/2011
It hasn’t been long since when thinking about medical imaging we would visualize a physician holding an x-ray image to a light box as he or she studied the anatomy. By today’s standards, those old medical images would seem quaint if they didn’t believe the very real image management problem hospitals will face in the coming years.
The confluence of sophisticated new medical-imaging technologies and federal regulations that encourage the expansion of electronic medical records has whipsawed hospitals and their technology managers. The challenge to store, retrieve and securely share these massive and mushrooming collections of data pose a credible threat to the creation of a healthcare system fit for the 21st century.
The Data Management Healthcheck 2010 global survey into hospitals ongoing strategies for managing their IT systems found that 69 percent of healthcare organizations are expecting volumes of their data to increase over the next year. 65 percent of those noted that Picture Archiving and a Communication Systems (PACS) files would be responsible for the increase, followed by Electronic Patient Record (EPR) files (45.5 percent). 84 percent of the attendants said that more than half of their healthcare organizations’ data was older than six months and only 26 percent mentioned that they had full archiving capabilities.
The survey also found that the top IT spending priority for 2010 was disaster recovery (44 percent), closely followed by PACS (38 percent) and digitizing paper records (35 percent).
Radiology professionals and health IT providers are looking at new technologies for MRIs, CAT scans and other healthcare imaging modalities, some of which will become ubiquitous in hospitals in the years to come. These and most other healthcare experts realize that a hospital’s ability to efficiently capture, store and retrieve the right medical images at the right time will reduce redundant and expensive procedures, and improve overall diagnoses and patient care. They also realize that this will become increasingly more difficult as these new, more sophisticated digital imaging technologies emerge.
The need to securely store, retrieve and integrate those images seamlessly into electronic medical records will greatly tax systems currently in place.
Anyone with a digital camera and a couple of cute kids understands the demands digital images put on technology systems. A single image from a five-megapixel camera can be as large as 40MB. Meanwhile, medical scanners that currently take eight to 64 'slices,' each a separate image, are now being replaced with devices that take 256 slices that can produce as many as 7,000 high-definition images during each scan.
Five years ago, the average 300 to 500-bed hospital needed about two terabytes of storage for medical imaging. Today, it needs almost 50 times that amount. Storage requirements have soared into petabyte territory — that’s about one billion megabytes. It’s not just important to save these images a few months, but rather government regulations and standards of care mandate that images may need to be stored for 7, 10 or 20 years or longer.
Hospitals need to look for end-to-end systems that can handle the full gamut of diagnostic imaging procedures like CT Scans, MRI and EKG traces, pulmonary tests, surgical scope procedures and digital mammography. IT solutions that provide a common storage pool so doctors can access any image they need with the click or two of a mouse will save hospital staff time. If hospitals invest in technology that provides petabyte-scale levels of storage space, they can archive medical images for years, even decades if required.
As the sheer number of medical imaging technologies continues to expand in the future, the costs of storing and archiving all those pictures will dwarf the cost of acquiring sophisticated equipment that generates medical images in the first place. Hospitals today are in need of intelligent data-management strategies. Our customers have told us that they have more than 100 applications that produce images they need to archive, so these new storage technologies must store images across multiple departments and facilities.
These systems have to be able to identify and archive the 90 percent of the images that may never need to be accessed again, and they have to keep handy the 10 percent of images doctors need for quick diagnosis and decision making. And finally, these systems must have the built-in ability to automate tedious processes and free healthcare providers to focus on their patients instead of data management procedures.
The explosion of digital information required by regulations and created by invaluable new technologies has created an unprecedented challenge for our hospitals. Improving data storage and simplifying data management will help today’s healthcare providers avoid the looming image management problem and free their budgets to improve other critical facets of patient care.
Jamie Coffin, Ph.D., is Vice President at Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences.
The confluence of sophisticated new medical-imaging technologies and federal regulations that encourage the expansion of electronic medical records has whipsawed hospitals and their technology managers. The challenge to store, retrieve and securely share these massive and mushrooming collections of data pose a credible threat to the creation of a healthcare system fit for the 21st century.
The Data Management Healthcheck 2010 global survey into hospitals ongoing strategies for managing their IT systems found that 69 percent of healthcare organizations are expecting volumes of their data to increase over the next year. 65 percent of those noted that Picture Archiving and a Communication Systems (PACS) files would be responsible for the increase, followed by Electronic Patient Record (EPR) files (45.5 percent). 84 percent of the attendants said that more than half of their healthcare organizations’ data was older than six months and only 26 percent mentioned that they had full archiving capabilities.
The survey also found that the top IT spending priority for 2010 was disaster recovery (44 percent), closely followed by PACS (38 percent) and digitizing paper records (35 percent).
Radiology professionals and health IT providers are looking at new technologies for MRIs, CAT scans and other healthcare imaging modalities, some of which will become ubiquitous in hospitals in the years to come. These and most other healthcare experts realize that a hospital’s ability to efficiently capture, store and retrieve the right medical images at the right time will reduce redundant and expensive procedures, and improve overall diagnoses and patient care. They also realize that this will become increasingly more difficult as these new, more sophisticated digital imaging technologies emerge.
The need to securely store, retrieve and integrate those images seamlessly into electronic medical records will greatly tax systems currently in place.
Anyone with a digital camera and a couple of cute kids understands the demands digital images put on technology systems. A single image from a five-megapixel camera can be as large as 40MB. Meanwhile, medical scanners that currently take eight to 64 'slices,' each a separate image, are now being replaced with devices that take 256 slices that can produce as many as 7,000 high-definition images during each scan.
Five years ago, the average 300 to 500-bed hospital needed about two terabytes of storage for medical imaging. Today, it needs almost 50 times that amount. Storage requirements have soared into petabyte territory — that’s about one billion megabytes. It’s not just important to save these images a few months, but rather government regulations and standards of care mandate that images may need to be stored for 7, 10 or 20 years or longer.
Hospitals need to look for end-to-end systems that can handle the full gamut of diagnostic imaging procedures like CT Scans, MRI and EKG traces, pulmonary tests, surgical scope procedures and digital mammography. IT solutions that provide a common storage pool so doctors can access any image they need with the click or two of a mouse will save hospital staff time. If hospitals invest in technology that provides petabyte-scale levels of storage space, they can archive medical images for years, even decades if required.
As the sheer number of medical imaging technologies continues to expand in the future, the costs of storing and archiving all those pictures will dwarf the cost of acquiring sophisticated equipment that generates medical images in the first place. Hospitals today are in need of intelligent data-management strategies. Our customers have told us that they have more than 100 applications that produce images they need to archive, so these new storage technologies must store images across multiple departments and facilities.
These systems have to be able to identify and archive the 90 percent of the images that may never need to be accessed again, and they have to keep handy the 10 percent of images doctors need for quick diagnosis and decision making. And finally, these systems must have the built-in ability to automate tedious processes and free healthcare providers to focus on their patients instead of data management procedures.
The explosion of digital information required by regulations and created by invaluable new technologies has created an unprecedented challenge for our hospitals. Improving data storage and simplifying data management will help today’s healthcare providers avoid the looming image management problem and free their budgets to improve other critical facets of patient care.
Jamie Coffin, Ph.D., is Vice President at Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences.
