SOA & WOA Magazine

With "meaningful use" and "interoperability" emerging as key concepts in current discussions about health information technology, forward-looking healthcare leaders are compelled to seek solutions designed specifically to deliver optimal access to data generated by diverse systems across their enterprises, notes Tony Cotterill, President and CEO of BridgeHead Software, a leading developer of healthcare data management software.

"Nowhere is this need - or this challenge - reflected more clearly than in the field of radiology," he adds, pointing to the broad spectrum of imaging modalities and data management issues currently being discussed at the annual Radiology Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago. "More and more hospitals are relying upon multiple PACS systems to capture and present images for clinical review. While vital to quality patient care, this diversity raises a host of challenges related to long-term storage, retrieval and access to images."

To address this need, increasing numbers of healthcare organizations are evaluating enterprise imaging (EI) projects to create a central archive enabling universal access and streamlined data management. KLAS, in fact, recently issued a report on the topic, noting that many hospitals initially looked towards their PACS vendors to help fulfill this vision of EI. However, no single PACS vendor crosses all imaging departments, the report notes, causing hospitals to investigate PACS-neutral archives and storage management. This model would allow hospitals to implement best-of-breed PACS systems to meet the divergent clinical viewing requirements of various imaging-intense specialty departments such as interventional radiology and nuclear medicine. At the same time, agnostic archive and storage management functionality would allow healthcare organizations to move imaging data into the domain of the IT department.

BridgeHead Software offers a unique product set to advance hospital efforts to achieve EI: its recently released HEAT appliance combined with time-tested BH PACStore functionality. HEAT - or Heterogeneous Enterprise Archive Technology, developed with Sun Microsystems - provides seamless integration with PACS, health information systems (HIS) and electronic health records (EHR) systems to deliver centralized access to healthcare data. Additionally, BH PACStore provides long-term storage and retrieval of PACS imaging data to create a cost-effective DICOM storage infrastructure.

"We're confident that our offerings address many of the obstacles the industry currently faces," Cotterill says. "It's clear that no single PACS system meets all needs. And healthcare leaders must keep in mind that a PACS vendor's objective is to encourage widespread adoption of its technology - not necessarily to ensure that a hospital's imaging data management needs are met as effectively as possible." The agnostic approach offered by BridgeHead, on the other hand, supports optimal use of PACS while streamlining image data management, simplifying migration tasks, and reducing storage and archival costs.

"The net result," he adds, "is that imaging can be fully integrated and easily accessible throughout the care continuum, accelerating an organization's progress towards meaningful use and streamlined data sharing."