
DECEMBER 6, 2011 • VOLUME 4 • NUMBER 6

image sharing

RSNA Image Share Network Enrolls First Patients

By David Rosenfeld

David Avrin Roderic Pettigrew Patients are at the center of control in an ongoing effort by the RSNA to standardize the way that medical images are shared on the Internet. In August 2011, The RSNA Image Share Network started enrolling its first patients to have images and reports stored electronically, through an online network accessible anywhere in the world.

The program began in 2009, with a $4.7 million grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) within the National Institutes of Health. The goal, within two years, is to enroll 300,000 patients and expand from the five university medical centers currently involved to 28 institutions.

David Mendelson, MD, is chief of clinical informatics at Mount Sinai Medical Center (New York, New York) and is the project’s chief investigator. He says, “We are deliberately going slowly with this first version because we want to find out what bugs there are and what little things we need to fix and patch. I’m very pleased with what we’ve accomplished so far.”

Mendelson says that the program has succeeded in creating a uniform set of transaction and communication standards. The application has been released as open-source software to promote communication among systems. The consortium also has created a series of security layers similar to those in place for bank transactions.

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Rex Healthcare: Taking the Logical Next Step in Image Exchange

By Cheryl Proval

As someone who has found himself—more than once—in a mad dash to catch the day’s last FedEx® pickup so that an out-of-town physician could have a patient’s images stat, Tom Hasley sees the wisdom of a cloud-based solution to image delivery. Hasley is systems support manager, ambulatory services, for Rex Healthcare (Raleigh, North Carolina), and he oversees image delivery for the system’s 400-bed hospital and four ambulatory sites, which conduct about 175,000 diagnostic-imaging procedures per year.

In addition to meeting the health-care needs of its patients (including the occasional patient who transfers to a luminary site), Rex Healthcare is provider to the Carolina Mudcats, a local baseball farm team for the Cleveland Indians. When a player is injured, the team’s orthopedic surgeon does not want to wait 24 hours to receive a CD.

In March 2011, Rex Healthcare launched a cloud-based image-sharing solution and began the arduous process of weaning patients, referrers, and radiology providers off the bedeviling CDs and VPNs that require so much support and so many resources. The next step is the transition to a new cloud-based provider with sharing that is tightly integrated with Synapse PACS from FUJIFILM Medical Systems USA (Stamford, Connecticut), the institution’s longtime PACS provider; this will enable radiologists who wish to share an image with a referrer to do so within the Synapse user interface.

Several years, ago, Rex Healthcare began the transition to digital image exchange in the same way that many other institutions did—by setting up VPNs with its radiology provider, Raleigh Radiology Associates; several other heavy image requesters; and a competing hospital in town.

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Cloud-based Image-sharing Solution Gives On-demand Access to Images

By Matthew Skoufalos

Andrew Rosenzweig Streamlining interaction between imaging departments and referring clinicians not only saves time, lives, and duplicate studies, but can also improve productivity. One of the most powerful new approaches to eliminating the physical and networking barriers to image sharing is the use of cloud computing.

At the 2011 annual RSNA meeting in Chicago, Illinois, held November 27–December 2, a leading supplier of CD image-burning technology, DatCard Systems (Irvine, California), introduced a next-generation, cloud-based image-sharing solution, Agilisys Adaptive Image eXchange (AIX). The solution will also be offered in a tight integration with Synapse PACS from FUJIFILM Medical Systems USA (Stamford, Connecticut), providing radiologists with the ability to share images within the PACS user interface.

Andrew Rosenzweig, vice president of sales and marketing for DatCard Systems, says, “We’re not your standard storage box.” Rosenzweig says that AIX can bridge differences in disparate PACS environments worldwide because it is designed for easy, secure end-user access. In a world in which teleradiology, remote night coverage, and nontraditional scheduling are the norm, the imaging department is being asked to adapt by providing always-available patient data, no matter how large or expensive those data are to store and transmit.

Cloud computing works by leveraging infrastructure as technology, and AIX demonstrates the everyday potential of this concept by tapping into the infrastructure of Savvis® (Town and Country, Missouri), which includes more than 20,000 fully managed private circuits and a tier 1 OC-192 Internet backbone with more than 17,000 miles of fiber. Savvis operates data centers in the North America, Europe, and Asia.

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$1 Billion Available for Innovative Health Projects
Do you have an innovative imaging IT idea that could improve the quality of health and care, and reduce health-care costs, for Medicare, Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollees? In November, the US DHHS launched the Health Care Innovation Challenge to jump-start innovation in health-care delivery, with special preference given to projects that rapidly hire, train, and deploy health-care workers. Grants will be awarded beginning in March 2012 and are expected to range from $1 million to $30 million.