Simplifying and Streamlining Your IT Environment

Moving enterprise imaging to the cloud simplifies your IT environment, which can help lead to economic benefits for your organization, and enhanced care for your patients. As imaging lies at the heart of the healthcare delivery system, it is important to modernize enterprise systems at a pace that meets your organization’s goals and maximizes your investments.

In our webinar, “Moving Enterprise Imaging to the Cloud: Is Your Organization Ready?” industry-leading experts discuss how organizations can move forward with strategies to optimize imaging performance.

Meet the experts:

• Ken Buechele, vice president of information technology, Bronson Healthcare
• Archie Mayani, chief product officer of Enterprise Imaging, Change Healthcare
• Greg Mogel, M.D., chief medical officer for CareSelect, Change Healthcare

The Challenges

Moving imaging to the cloud presents a variety of challenges. To improve imaging workflows, reduce costs, and ultimately enhance the delivery of care, CIOs must carefully balance cost and complexity with the enhanced outcomes they aim to deliver.

Ken Buechele knows firsthand what many providers face. Bronson Healthcare wanted to provide increased value from a business perspective but struggled to get the right amount of value out of their IT investments.

Other healthcare IT organizations are similarly seeking ways to modernize the technology clinicians use for patient care, while doing more than just managing storage. Increasing security to reduce vulnerabilities to cyberattacks and speeding access to images are also high priorities. 

Among provider staff, radiologists face specific challenges that impact patient care. Cloud imaging has the potential to improve the massive inefficiencies in imaging interpretation, thereby driving more efficient access to information through interoperability. 

IT Organization Strategies

In our webinar, Ken discusses the strategies Bronson Healthcare has employed to address those challenges:

Maximizing the value of existing tool sets by making sure they have one electronic medical record, one medical imaging system, and ensuring a systematic approach to what they do. Cloud enterprise imaging has facilitated a shift from the traditional IT approach to a more digital and consumer health strategy, allowing them to focus on care delivery and patient engagement experiences in a much different way.

Building efficiencies with cloud-native innovation to improve negotiations with large groups of radiologists. Cloud-native architecture can be a point in negotiating with large groups of practices because it makes sending and receiving images to the right clinicians more efficient. Cloud is transformative in its ability to connect your enterprise through a single unified platform for all your imaging needs.

Improving care coordination and access to information.  Quality communication between ordering providers, radiologists, and specialists is paramount, and a cloud-native tool gives them the right approach to disseminating information. Bronson Healthcare predicts that their journey to enterprise imaging will allow them to unlock insights and advanced reporting capabilities that their legacy technologies couldn’t deliver.

Improving workflow optimization. Cloud imaging optimizes workflows and reduces the inefficiencies between reading images. Providers must think about centralizing data to teach their systems to implement effective, smarter workflows that provide true decision support.

Improving security and reducing vulnerabilities to cyberattacks. Protecting healthcare data is an urgent matter. Best practices are to have SOC2 compliance and HITRUST certification.

Cybersecurity and the Cloud

Cybersecurity has become a key issue for organizations considering a move to the cloud. Technical debt limits how quickly organizations can fix complex, customized systems, and maintaining on-prem systems is harder than maintaining those in the cloud. Sharing responsibility with a cloud vendor allows healthcare organizations to shift responsibility to a technology team with the necessary skills and resources in place.

Healthcare IT organizations need cyber resilience against threats such as hacks and security attacks. They also need to take patient privacy and sensitivity around data sharing into account. The cloud is a more secure option than archaic systems.

Finally, our experts discuss the efficiency cloud-native solutions offer. They illustrate how the current pain of imaging practices–the time a radiologist spends not reading studies, getting all the images together from multiple different systems, and making sure the clinician has the data–leaves minimal time for doctors to read and interpret studies, and often must do so with patients present.

Having a more efficient imaging workflow is critical to improved patient care, especially as practices become more focused on integrated delivery networks.  Tune in to hear more about Bronson Healthcare’s experience and to learn how and where your organization might benefit by moving to cloud imaging.