More isn’t always merrier - how enterprise imaging strategies advance healthcare’s digital transformation

Healthcare is embracing the ‘it takes a team’ mentality and is navigating away from siloed care. 

However, maturing past disparate care will be impossible without our technology systems following suit. 

The need for critical patient information to flow easily – and unobtrusively – has made it common practice for a single electronic health record system (EHR) to act as a key element of hospital operations and have a presence in each department. Just as hospitals have built these connected infrastructures for patient records, we will see the same happen for managing imaging and diagnostic data across healthcare’s ecosystems.

All stakeholders, from the C-suite to the individual radiologist or pathologist, increasingly recognize the need for a central hub of all imaging and diagnostic components that can easily communicate with the EHR to improve efficiency and productivity. By pursuing a strong enterprise imaging strategy, healthcare organizations can future-proof their operations and advance their ability to build a holistic patient picture and streamline care delivery. 

Today’s disparate landscape

Today more than ever, diagnostics play a central role in the patient’s healthcare journey. Oftentimes, imaging and/or labs are the first stop in care delivery, with nearly every specialty relying on them in some way. There are also mounting expectations from patients, clinicians in other departments, administrators and executives to work more efficiently and seamlessly. The outcomes-based environment that healthcare organizations now operate under in the age of value-based care means services and results are expected to be delivered faster, cheaper, for more patients and with higher accuracy. 

While this is well-intentioned and designed with the goal of improving patient outcomes, it is made increasingly difficult by our still disparate landscape. In many hospitals, each department’s imaging system – such as oncology, cardiology or neurology – operates on separate islands. Needless to say, a patient’s journey can often take them through more than one of these islands, and their data needs to seamlessly travel with them to give each a comprehensive understanding of where a patient has been and where they need to go. Instead, the result today is often duplicate or incomplete diagnostic data, hurting productivity, wasting resources and impacting timely care for patients whose lives could depend on it. 

Beyond the impact that a lack of data synchronization can have on patient care, we also must consider what this means for the staff experience. Time spent dissecting data to fulfill administrative reporting tasks means less meaningful time with patients and a higher risk of burnout. 45% of radiologists report feeling burnt out, much of which is attributed to the overwhelming amount of bureaucratic tasks. When our lack of data integration is impacting both patient care and the happiness of our staff, it is time to find a solution to enhance visualization and streamline processes.