Etiam Corp.

Healthcare technology has evolved immensely in the past few years. With electronic medical records (EMR), medical image transfers or telemedicine, it is easy to forget that the priority is the patient — an individual person with unique needs, concerns and feelings. 

Several industries have used cloud solutions for many years, but cloud computing only recently started to be used in healthcare. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cloud computing is defined as “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”¹ As more and more healthcare organizations (HCOs) adopt electronic medical records (EMRs), the cloud database has offered an efficient solution for image sharing, particularly in radiology where it is bridging the gap between referring physicians and radiologists.

The release of the new Etiam Nexus 4.2, the core digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) router of Etiam-Connect services, will be launched and available for demonstration Dec. 1-6 at the upcoming Radiological Society of North America Annual Meeting  (RSNA 2013) in Chicago.

As other industries turn to the virtual cloud for a variety of information technology (IT) solutions, those in healthcare — especially in radiology — continue to weigh in carefully on the pros and cons of running software tools, as well as hosting their data and medical images, on a third-party server. While the potential for lower costs, improved scalability and faster deployment of services is attractive to physicians and hospitals, concerns such as security issues and increased dependence on an external service provider can also factor into decisions regarding the cloud.

June 14, 2012 — Etiam introduced its DICOM Izer 4.0 at this year’s SIIM (Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine) conference, held June 7-10 in Orlando, Fla. The new version contains major enhancements to make it the most advanced solution for bringing digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) compliance to non-imaging data for greater interoperability and integration into the patient record.