By John Wallace
It was impossible to see and do everything at the 2019 RSNA Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting in Chicago. However, the Imaging Community Exchange (ICE) magazine is able to share some of the exciting news from the event.
Change Healthcare announced the latest milestone in its strategic initiative to build and implement its cloud-native Enterprise Imaging Network – the addition of four leading health systems as development partners. Hosted by Change Healthcare on the Google Cloud Platform, the network is the centerpiece of Change Healthcare’s enterprise imaging strategy. Built from the ground up to exploit the flexible nature of cloud services and delivery, the network will enhance and optimize medical imaging data – enabling providers to improve clinical, financial and operational outcomes.
The four new provider partners are Bronson Healthcare, Community Health Systems Professional Services Corporation, Montefiore Nyack Hospital, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and UW Health, Madison Wisconsin. Each partner will work with Change Healthcare to help accelerate development of the solution by implementing the platform as it is built and providing ongoing, real-world feedback. Collectively, these partners manage 124 hospitals with an annual imaging volume of over 5.6 million studies. They will migrate more than 66 million studies to the Change Healthcare Enterprise Imaging Network cloud, with over 2.8 petabytes being handled by the network. Customer implementations are expected to go live in the first half of 2020 as a fully-managed software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution from Change Healthcare.
“The problem today with enterprise imaging on the cloud is that most solutions are not developed specifically for the cloud, but instead are lifted from legacy technologies and re-platformed,” said Tomer Levy, general manager, Cloud Solutions at Change Healthcare. “This means providers aren’t realizing the full benefits in improved care coordination, cost realization and reduced infrastructure complexity that true cloud-native solutions can provide. From the time we first partnered with Google Cloud, we’ve focused on building a solution that doesn’t simply replicate traditional on-premise systems, but delivers everything providers expect in an enterprise imaging service – plus clinical and operational capabilities that are only available through a true cloud-native SaaS platform.”
The Change Healthcare Enterprise Imaging Network includes:
- Imaging Archive: A vendor-neutral archive that centrally manages imaging studies from multiple locations, provides simple and secure access, and allows secure sharing.
- Image Viewer: A diagnostic-quality viewer for clinical care teams that lets physicians and clinical specialists securely access patient images and reports at any time, from any place.
- Imaging Analytics: A dashboard that presents near-real-time data from across the enterprise to visualize historical results and trends, information to support clinical decisions, and predictive models for clinical planning.
- Change Healthcare AI (Artificial Intelligence) Orchestration Services: A vendor-neutral platform that streamlines integration of multiple AI algorithms across multiple vendors.
Tracy Byers, senior vice president and general manager enterprise imaging at Change Healthcare, spoke about this news at RSNA. She said looking into the future there is “lots of data locked up in discrete systems.”
“Change Healthcare is looking at how to unlock data and take it to the next level,” Byers said.
Levy spoke about the importance of integrating AI properly and how that can improve workflow.
He spoke about bringing imaging and EMR together and eliminating “separate silos.” Levy said Change Healthcare is focused on how to apply AI in order to pull relevant information from EMR and present it to the radiologist.
