The Future of Mobile Technology in Healthcare
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Andy Lim, HCIS Business Manager ASEAN,
Carestream Health Singapore
Technology is constantly evolving. It seems like every day there is a better, smaller device that replaces the new one you bought yesterday and still don’t know how to use yet. In the past (present for some hospitals), image sharing was done solely via film distribution and multiple copies needed to be printed for multiple physicians to view the study.
As technology advances, hospitals begin looking to store their digital images in a centralized archive for distribution within and outside the hospital. This enhances the workflow of the hospital and brings clinical benefits not only to radiologists and clinicians, but also to patients.
While different technology may support certain mobile devices, your archive is the source where data is fed to your device. Your archive is also the foundation of data sharing.
Having a Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) in place today ensures all clinical data belonging to the patient is securely stored and ready to be connected to a validated mobile technology/device. The other advantage of VNA is that data is stored in a non-proprietary format with the ability to ingest and store DICOM and NON-DICOM files so it gives the clinical users a complete patient portfolio, hence enhancing better patient care.
This mobile technology is extremely beneficial to three key groups of mobile users in the radiology space:
- Radiologists want access to view emergency cases and provide preliminary reports without traveling back to the hospital when they’re on call.
- Clinicians want access to images and reports in the clinic without complex installation or the need for a high end workstation.
- Patients want access to images and medical reports without the need to carry film or DVDs, and to be able to share their studies with other doctors for second opinions.
At Carestream, we’ve come a long way in the design of our software for use with mobile technologies and platforms to ensure they evolve in accordance with the needs of our customers and are easily integrated with the wide array of healthcare technologies. We realize that nothing lasts forever but rather than just accepting the fact, we responded by creating affordable solutions for our customers to stay one step ahead of technology.
We recognize that not every IT solution can provide enterprise distribution – and yet that is what you need. For this reason we developed Vue Motion, a lightweight, vendor neutral viewer that can enables radiologists and clinicians to access patient data regardless of whether it is embedded in an EMR or it is serving as a standalone imaging viewer. It has an intuitive interface, so it requires no dedicated resources or training. Yet it can handle virtually any task from calling up basic patient information to accessing full studies, as well as distributing reports and images.
Patients are becoming more involved than ever in their healthcare. As image distribution in radiology evolves, hospitals are constantly looking at innovative and cost effective methods to distribute images and results to the patient. Spire Healthcare, the UK’s second largest provider of private healthcare, has implemented Carestream’s Vue Motion zero-footprint viewer to enable its clinicians to view patient images on Apple, Android and other validated devices.
As this independent viewer is PACS-agnostic, clinicians across Spire can securely view PACS images from all of Spire’s 37 locations, where 27 sites have CARESTREAM Vue RIS/PACS and 10 sites use other systems. This ability to access images across multiple platforms is bringing increased flexibility to Spire consultants and timely results to patients.
“Vue Motion has made a vast difference to my image reporting,” said Dr Qaiser Malik, Consultant Radiologist at Spire Healthcare. “I no longer have to physically go to the hospital to log in at one of the workstations to view images and previous reports. I can log in at weekends wherever I am which is of great advantage. It is an absolutely fabulous tool and advances patient care by providing clinicians with timely reports and a head-start on treatment options.”
Read the full case study on Spire Healthcare and see what more Vue Motion provided the facility with here:
What is the biggest obstacle for your facility to overcome when trying to keep up with the variety of healthcare technologies?
