Mach7 Technologies Inc.

May 23, 2018 — Mach7 Technologies and Client Outlook announced their expanded partnership to focus on today’s prevalent ...

A battle is raging in imaging IT today. Once a profitable hunting ground for traditional picture archiving and communication system (PACS) firms, new market entrants from the content management, archiving and informatics market are looking to disrupt the status quo. Pushing “deconstruction,” “reconstruction” and “distributed” multi-vendor imaging IT models, they have grabbed the attention of healthcare providers.

The implementation of electronic health records (EHR) has created an expectation that all patient data, including images, should be available in one location. Today, reports describing images are not enough, as many referring physicians want to see the images, and many use them to help guide therapies. This has caused an increased demand to exchange medical images in the various departments of healthcare settings. 

Organizations across the country — even globally — are taking a hard look at their imaging ecosystems and determining it is time for change. Most technology and clinical leaders have read, listened to and observed the imaging vendor narrative over the past few years while they focused primarily on deploying the electronic health records (HER). Now most feel comfortable enough — either internally or with the help of consultants — to tackle this next huge patient record initiative. Vendor neutral archives (VNA), viewers, workflow, analytics, integration and exchange are all under review as components of the enterprise imaging effort. The good news for those in this phase of discovery and analysis is that the pioneers are far enough down the path to prove that an enterprise approach can be incredibly successful and that there are organizational, clinical, technical and even financial benefits to adopting this model.  

"The industry standard of imaging system availability is 99.999 percent uptime, but that’s not good enough for Broward Health. Our vendor neutral archive (VNA) is a critical system in our enterprise imaging environment. It serves as the brains of our operation, supporting a variety of clinical customers within high acuity settings. Broward Health Medical Center is a Level I Trauma Center where every minute counts. We need zero downtime.”