DIGITAL HEALTH
“ It ’ s about making sure that future radiologists look at this field and feel like they can both make a quality living and have a great experience to be able to do what they love ”
MIKE LIPPS CEO , INTELERAD
important images first to help them prioritise the most urgent cases .
Absolutely essential to this , is interoperability . " If you think about all of the tools in a practitioner ' s environment , from the EMR , to the images , the viewers and the archives , and then the analytics tools that sit on top of that , the AI tools that are increasingly becoming more important and the reporting tools - it ' s a really complex environment . Complexity increases cost , and increases the time that it takes to be able to diagnose patients and ultimately to be able to treat them " Lipps says .
" The goal of any hospital and health system has to be to reduce that complexity as much as they possibly can . They have an incentive to do it , because they have to find ways to lower their costs and because it leads to better patient outcomes . By looking at their technology platforms , and finding ways to simplify those systems in a way that creates better end user experiences for the patient and the practitioner , hospital and health systems will improve the quality and standard of care going forward ."
While having less complex systems seems obvious , up until recently the tech didn ' t exist to make this possible . " For a while there was this mentality in healthcare of having best-of-breed solutions . There was this false premise that you had to have an individual radiology system and an individual cardiology system , and each one had to have their own archives and workflow tools . I would argue that the technology landscape has changed to the degree that for example , you can have a singular archive that serves multiple modalities . That ultimately lowers costs , reduces complexity , and increases the speed at which care can be delivered .
" You can have simpler , fewer systems and broader platforms without sacrificing the quality that you get for the individual modalities ," he adds .
Cloud technology has been a huge enabler of this . " You can do things like archive in the cloud in a way that you couldn ' t have done 5-10 years ago " Lipps says . " That creates the ability to route these images inside the hospital and outside of the hospital . If you think about what ' s changed during the pandemic , radiologists having an imaging system they could use outside the hospital was a success . The cloud enables that distribution - the ability to simplify those platforms , have fewer different tools , less integrations and less cost and complexity . I think leading hospitals and health systems now are certainly looking at that and are really taking advantage of trying to simplify their technology footprint ."
One example of this is a leading hospital in Canada that Intelerad works with . " They effectively moved a lot of their
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