Enterprise imaging strategy still emerging
For some hospital executives, given the long-term investment and dominance of the EMR, there may also seem to be few coherent alternatives to the timely extension of EMR into the diagnostic sector. This is in part due to the relatively slow movement of the imaging IT industry. Radiology IT has traditionally been based on PACS/RIS, essentially single department image management and archive software. Today, most of the global installed base is still stand-alone.
Yet imaging IT has been evolving a lot in recent years. New imaging IT software has evolved to focus on centralising core imaging and diagnostic reporting across the enterprise, bringing other allied disparate imaging or diagnostic applications into a single platform. The net result of this is intended to support health providers in pursuing an “enterprise imaging” strategy, consolidating all types of imaging software together.
The industry has, however, done a poor job of explaining the concept of enterprise imaging as a strategy, as opposed to a product. Many have also used “enterprise imaging” to describe “enterprise radiology”, connecting disparate PACS in multi-site networks. While a clear benefit as a short-term solution to combining core radiology at scale, this approach has missed the operational and clinical value of consolidating unstructured imaging and clinical data from other diagnostic departments (dermatology, emergency medicine, surgery, gastroenterology, etc.) into a centralised imaging platform.
Positively, the “enterprise imaging” strategy is slowly gaining traction, with recent major deals showcasing the combination of radiology with other disciplines. In our earlier piece following the SIIM2019 show we also identified in which other diagnostic disciplines imaging IT platforms were having most impact and how quickly. These are outlined below:
