Problem
- CLINICAL REALITIES. Clinical content is an asset of an organization and needs to be managed accordingly across an Enterprise. Clinical systems have a lifecycle defined by a vendor contract. For example, PACS storage lifecycle is trending at 3 to 5 years and clinical data retention policies exceed PACS lifecycles. Clinical staff productivity is adversely impacted by the need to navigate between EMR and disparate PACS/digital systems. The silos of clinical information make sharing images and data extremely difficult resulting in the failure to provide physician access to complete patient data.
- PROPRIENTARY CONVERSION. All vendors use the word open. However, “open” is a euphemism for “I’m open to other systems integrating with me” or “my proprietary system is built using standard technology.” In the end, change happens and at current rates it is highly unlikely that vendors will manage to keep pace. New innovations and vendors will appear requiring proprietary conversions. Medical institutions must end vendor lock, trapping clinical value and stopping the insanity of incessant, late, and costly migrations. 80% of IT change is non-value added data migration.
- ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE. Hospitals continue to evolve their strategies for integrating with, and purchasing new entities. New lines of business require new systems. Government intervention, regulation, and incentives will require new methods. Core clinical content has to adapt and be available and not hinder adjusting.
- DIGITAL MEDICAL SCIENCE. Digital medical innovation and its adoption to better diagnose and treat patients and get paid for those services is accelerating, without regard to systems and infrastructure needed to manage it - much less enable it to do so cost effectively. New standards keep emerging, while existing standards aren’t going away or aren’t being adopted fast enough. The size and magnitude of complexity, interrelationships and necessary short and long-term availability of the content is somewhat overwhelming.
- MINDLESS STORAGE. It is clearly not just a storage problem. It is an intelligence, current workflow and future use issue. Smartly managing data is about clinical relevance and a shift from terabytes-for-the-enterprise to terabytes-for-an-individual-patient. In a multi-petabyte, even exabyte medical future that is here now, how will hospitals evolve to cope with digital overload without breaking the bank?
- UNINTEGRATED SILOS. The vision is clear. We need complete digital records, workflows with ubiquitous sharing, and data that follows complex medical relationships. Today’s average Medicare patient alone sees 7 physicians in 4 practices a year. Average hospitals coordinate care between 229 physicians for these patients. Exploding healthcare demands from an aging and internet savvy population are at their infancy. Rapidly changing expectations and expenses dictate new ways of thinking.
- COMPETITIVE PRESSURE. Robotic surgery. Women’s only centers. Disease-based lines of business. Meaningful use. Patient portals. Physician referral patterns. Clinical staff shortages. Time is not on the side of any hospital’s digital infrastructure. To compete, flexibility, speed, adaptability, and agility are key against a reality of too many IT projects already. Vendor, system independence and open innovation environments are critical at the patient “tera-content”, “tera-complexity” level.
The TeraMedica Advantage
- CHANGE READY. Embrace change, freeing an organization to do what is best clinically, while giving cost effective, elegant and effective answers for the information technology infrastructure now, and in the long range.
- FREEDOM. Unchain hospitals from vendor lock and give strategic freedom.
- SINGULARITY. Bring together silos of clinical content under one infrastructure while providing unique qualities of service to originating clinical areas.
- COMPREHENSIVE. Manage any type of digital clinical content that can be associated with patient/study context, including standards beyond DICOM content such as PDF files, video files, sound files, JPEG, and TIFF images.
- INDEPENDENCE. Provide vendor independent, long-term, clinical enterprise image management storage solution for all individual department PACS, mini-PACS, and modalities being utilized in your facilities.
- ACCESIBILITY. Deliver long-term data repository accessible by a user of the EMR or a Physician portal through a universal lightweight image viewer.
- ECONOMIES OF SCALE. Create economies of scale, reducing the silos of clinical image data via the implementation of a shared institutional infrastructure.
- SECURITY. Reduce storage management costs and improve data security (HIPAA compliance) by using standard IT policies and principles for managing enterprise data.
- INTELLIGENCE. Standardize Enterprise Data Mgmt. Policies with intelligent rules thus greatly decreasing storage costs and reducing or eliminating legal liabilities using institutional data purge policies or data tier policies (hardware/compression rules).
- AVAILABILITY. Improve availability of data in a centralized diagnostic and treatment content hyper-archive allowing for an easier and less expensive implementation of a highly available data storage management solution.
- COST REDUCTION. Reduce interface costs using a shared hyper-archive platform to store clinical data and distribute it. IT management can reduce complex system interfaces to the EMR, enterprise information systems (EMPI, patient registration, etc.), & departmental information systems (RIS, CVIS, etc.) within the enterprise.
- OPTIMIZATION. Optimize IT Infrastructure options, allowing IT to select best tools (PACS, workstation, etc.) for clinicians to meet job requirements.
- CHANGE-FRIENDLY. Reduce difficulties involved in migrating large volumes of image studies and other content from vendor to vendor.
- TOTAL LIFECYCLE. Enhance Clinical Information Lifecycle Mgmt. by basing its value over time in a tiered clinically-aware archive. Improve information availability and reduce storage management costs using intelligent compression or purging techniques.
- SIMPLIFICATION. Improve patient care by simplifying sharing of imaging studies and clinical content between PACS, departments, and facilities. Clinicians can have access to additional relevant patient info.
- SMARTS. Create an Infrastructure for Data Mining and Outcomes Research: Smartstore’s enterprise basis solution allows for broad-based analysis of clinical data usage patterns. This information can be used to potentially reduce costs and improve efficiencies at the department, facility, or enterprise level.