Acuo Overview Brochure - Sponsored Whitepaper

Accessing patient information and managing images from across all the silos of data held by the different “ologies” within the healthcare enterprise is a daunting task. Once accessed, matching the right viewer with the right user fur- ther challenges the situation. The viewing needs of clinicians will vary based on their specialty—more advanced for diag- nosticians and more straightforward for others.

Managing patient information must meet legal and regula- tory retention requirements and these rules can change over time. Life cycle management of data is coming of age as pa- tient information is being stored on systems never scaled or designed for the volumes stored today. As the healthcare enterprise grows, it becomes distributed and more complex with multi-sites and multi-PACS and multi-vendor PACS.

As patient information is dispersed across multiple depart- mental PACS, each individual department’s workflow con- tains patient information unique to that department. Aware- ness of the need outside the department is not fully appreci- ated resulting in image knowledge remaining within the de- partment.

As most PACS vendors with proprietary solutions do not offer access to latest innovations in the standards such as DICOM, IHE, and HL7, innovation is the first step to addressing the challenge. PACS vendors have developed a solution to one problem – departmental image management and storage – but the problem has changed.

PACS is at the center of the patient information challenge. Replacing PACS, storage media or upgrades require Data Mi- gration. Most PACS don’t leverage newer grid and storage technologies, or include clinical Information Lifecycle Man- agement policies for retention or deletion. With the need to share image data with the hospital’s EMR, it is difficult for most legacy PACS to pull this off.