If you are a patient who has received multiple medical imaging exams, perhaps to treat a chronic orthopedic condition or cancer, or a health care professional treating such a patient, chances are you’ve lost hours and hours of time tracking down and distributing medical images to providers. At eHealth Technologies, it’s our mission to change that.
- Ever since we launched eHealth Connect® Image Exchange in 2009, eHealth Technologies has been guided by a singular pursuit of making diagnostic medical images accessible to health care providers from anywhere, at any time. Long ago, our team recognized that working in conjunction with Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) presents a unique opportunity to deliver on that goal, because HIEs have unique capabilities. They are built to aggregate patient records across broad geographical areas, with the ability to maintain an index of patient identities across multiple health systems, clinics, and imaging centers.
- They also assure that only authorized, consented care providers can access each patient’s community-wide record.
eHealth Connect Image Exchange has been constructed from the ground up to take advantage of these HIE capabilities. Our workflow engine has been integrated directly into the leading HIE platforms, enabling “one-click” access to images as simply and securely as any other text-based record. Our expansive network of connections to imaging sources enables us to not only receive and share images, but our “hybrid-federated” architecture allows us to query each and every imaging source for each patient’s full history of images.
Until recently, most of our customers have discovered, viewed, compared, and imported images by way of our services embedded within clinical portals provided by their HIE. Millions of studies have been exchanged in this manner.
However, a new trend is emerging: Automated Imaging Workflow.
Automated Imaging Workflow comes in several flavors, with the common benefit of removing all remaining manual tasks required to access external images from around the community.
eHealth Connect Image Exchange can listen for clinical events that indicate images will be needed, locate the outside images that are relevant, and deliver them directly into the image store where the patient is being treated. This means, for example, that when patients present at an emergency department, relevant medical images from other locations will already be available at the fingertips of the physician within a few minutes. Cancer patients, for example, can rest assured that critical relevant prior images from other locations will be automatically located and delivered so radiologists and oncologists will be able to track disease progression quickly.
Apps are being embedded within Electronic Medical Records that light up within the patient record, indicating that external images and other records are available. Physicians no longer need to leave their EMR user interface to locate, view and import the imaging studies they need. Technologies such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) make this easier than ever to implement.
We are continually expanding our library of APIs to allow PACS, RIS and EMRs to discover, view and retrieve imaging studies “in the background”, again placing image access at the fingertips of care providers with little to no additional effort.
These Automated Imaging Workflow capabilities allow us to customize solutions that support our ultimate goal – efficient, clinically-informed health care. Does your health care organization share a similar goal? Connect with our team to explore a partnership that can help you achieve that goal.
