It’s time to forget all the days of burning image discs to send to out with your patients or to another hospital.  There’s a new game in town.  We’ve been playing this game for several years now but we’ve finally gained some new teams.  Hospitals, M.D.s and patients are now finding it easier and much quicker to access their images on the cloud.

There are at least a dozen HIPAA-compliant cloud storage systems available with just as many price levels to choose from.  These cloud storage systems can be tied directly into your PACS, VNA, or specific workstations.  With the proper planning and interfaces, you may never even have to touch the exam at all.

Basic set up includes an accelerator, vpn, and web access.  There must be a host system that sets up the cloud for its users (hospitals, M.D.s, patients, …) to access.  The host system also sets whether the receiving party can download the exam or just view the images from the cloud.  All of these vendors will work with you to properly set up your system and assist in getting your network of users to enlist.

Getting started is fairly simple once you’ve got the OK from your compliance and HIPAA guru.  We use a VM set up as our accelerator but any pc will do.  Your pc must have either the vendors Dicom host software or a generic installed.  Routing takes place on ours to auto-route our images directly to our PACS.  We manually touch each patient to merge them into our hospitals MRN.  If you are lucky enough to have a Dicom and RIS interface, then these can do the work for you.

Speaking of awesomeness, some of these cloud systems are FDA approved for diagnostic interpretation.  Not only that, they can be set up with your hospitals voice recognition software.  Purchase this model and you’ll be certain to put a smile on your Rads or Cards faces.  Do a little research and don’t delay.  The future is here!