PACS Drives the Image Exchange

Ms. PACS: "This was the year that imaging exchange went mainstream at the show,” said Elliot Menschik, M.D., Ph.D., who sits on the IT Infrastructure and Radiology planning committees of Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) International and has served as a member of the SSS-U study section at the NIH Center for Scientific Review.

Cross-enterprise document sharing (XDS-I) is the profile for medical image exchange that the U.S. Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) has adopted. The profile was also presented at “The Document Sharing Focus” at RSNA 2009 IHE Demonstration.

To understand the critical role PACS plays in driving the medical imaging exchange, Imaging Technology News asked Elliot Menschik, M.D., Ph.D, who sits on the IT Infrastructure and Radiology planning committees of Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) International and has served as a member of the SSS-U study section at the NIH Center for Scientific Review.

Why is XDS-I the most appropriate profile for a medical imaging exchange?

Dr. Menschik: For vendor-neutral exchange among disparate facilities/organizations, there is no interoperability alternative to XDS-I. DICOM alone is insufficient to manage issues such as multiple patient identities and federated, peer-to-peer publishing, discovery and exchange.

At the RSNA 2009 IHE Demonstration, PACS showed the benefits of driving images to the EHR and enabling provider and patient access to radiology images and reports. How is this beneficial to referring physicians?

Dr. Menschik: Referring physicians today struggle with either, one, managing a flood of inbound CD-ROMs or, two, logging into multiple Web-based PACS portals. The CD problem is particularly acute among surgical subspecialties - inbound CDs often don't run on the local PCs, when they do each one has a different viewer that is unfamiiar to the doc, and importing images off the disc is time-consuming and inefficient even when it can be accomplished (some CDs do not even store in DICOM). From the perspective of operational efficiency, referring physicians have much to gain from network-based access to outside images, whether in a patient's personal health record or a direct network connection to the imaging provider.

ITN: Do you think that PACS and radiology is driving the image exchange?

Dr. Menschik: For years, the radiology community has largely sat out of the health information exchange revolution despite having led healthcare for decades with novel applications of IT. This now seems to be changing...

Read the Full Article in the March issue of www.ITNonline.net