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Don’t Neglect the Bigger Imaging Picture

By Jim Knaub

It’s been eight or nine years since I first noticed a significant number of imaging topics turning up on the program for the annual HIMSS meeting. Before then, PACS and HIM were like two different foods on a finicky 5-year-old’s plate: They weren’t supposed to touch each other.

Things have changed since the PACS meatloaf first touched the HIM potatoes and I started attending HIMSS. These days the peas and carrots of EHRs have been added to the meat and potatoes—the recipe to create the shepherd’s pie that is the image-enabled EHR.

Looking at this year’s HIMSS program from an imaging perspective, the focus seems to be on how vendor-neutral archives (VNAs) will affect enterprise imaging at the department, enterprise, and health information exchange levels.

For example, there’s a course called “VNA for Enterprise Image Management — UnPAC Your Archives.” Eric Rice, chief technology officer (CTO) for Mach7 Technologies, and Trent Conwell, IT technical manager with Sentara Healthcare, will focus on why PACS deconstruction will give way to VNA expansion for enterprise image management, as well as what to look for in a VNA.

In that same vein, “Developing an Enterprise Imaging Strategy with VNA” will address how to use a VNA strategy to fix proprietary image storage problems, create an interoperable imaging infrastructure to normalize data, optimize image management, and streamline enterprise image access across a large network of hospitals and other facilities. Lynn Gibson, CTO for CHRISTUS Health in Texas, and Larry Sitka, the founder of Acuo Technologies, which is now part of Perceptive Software, are the course speakers.

And if you need a course title that is even less subtle, “Dawn of the Era of Enterprise Imaging” fills the bill. Louis Lannum, director of enterprise imaging at the Cleveland Clinic, and Richard Kennedy, regional technical director of imaging informatics for Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, will present case examples from organizations that have successfully executed new enterprise imaging strategies, technologies, and workflows.

Other imaging-related courses at the upcoming HIMSS meeting include sessions on the workflow involving multiple providers or specialties, mobile image viewing, and the HIMSS/Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine workgroup meeting.

While EHRs remain the hot topic in health care IT, enterprise-level management is the imaging-related topic on the minds of hospital IT people, which means it should be on the minds of your imaging department or radiology group. If it’s not already there, the shepherd’s pie that is the image-enabled EHR should be on your menu…or at least part of your menu planning.

— Jim Knaub is editor of Radiology Today.