Cleveland Clinic is in the midst of a project that aims to add massive medical image-archiving capabilities to its electronic medical records systems.
The project started several years ago with the Clinic’s radiology department and has grown to include 20 departments, including ophthalmology, women’s health, ambulatory endoscopy, anesthesiology, anatomical pathology, orthopedic surgery, cardiology and emergency medicine, The Plain Dealer reported.
“The innovative piece of this project is that it contains images from different departments in one central place,” said Louis Lannum, the Clinic’s director of enterprise imaging.
“Doctors can not only see radiology images, but also visual results of endoscopic procedures, ultrasound procedures and even photographs of patients taken in the emergency room to document a trauma or in dermatology to show progression of treatments,” he continued.
The Clinic uses an electronic medical records (EMR) system from Wisconsin-based Epic.
Certainly, the Clinic isn’t the only one to recognize the importance of adding image-viewing capabilities to the EMR. An increasing number of healthcare providers are beginning to look at ways to consolidate images onto a single archiving solution, according to consulting company Katalus.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
However, integrating images into the EMR has lagged behind other initiatives due to the urgency of meeting stage 1 meaningful use requirements, according to Katalus. EMR vendors have done some interfacing work, but true integration is still in the future.
Here’s Lannum discussing the Clinic’s image-enabled EMR system.
