Innovative healthcare technology is changing how care is delivered for patients worldwide, particularly within specialty care. Expertise and other services can be exchanged far beyond the physical walls of the institution. Physicians with their own practices and rural hospitals that may not have certain specialists attending full time still need to be able to ensure that their patients can be seen, remotely or otherwise, by a specialist who can lend their expertise. Even in practices that may have a specialist in their particular diagnosis, patients are increasingly seeking out second opinions from physicians all over the world to confirm their diagnosis or get a new perspective. However, how can we ensure that the receiving physician has all of the information necessary to provide a thorough and accurate diagnosis regardless of whether they physically see the patient or not?
Are you thinking about starting a Remote Second Opinion (RSO) program but don’t know where to begin?
Well, you’re not alone.
A lot goes into the planning and launch of a successful RSO program beyond just having expert physicians ready to give their second opinions. While it might seem like a daunting task to launch a remote second opinion program, it doesn’t have to be.
Topics: Remote Second Opinion Program
It may be appealing for a healthcare organization to consider writing their own enterprise medical software to specifically meet their unique needs. Commercial software is generally written to serve the more general demands of the healthcare industry and often doesn’t address the nuances of each particular organizations' operations. This makes it attractive to the in-house team to believe that it uniquely understands these peculiarities and dive head-first into the deep end to begin to code.
Topics: hospitals
The Horos Project provides a great medical image viewer, with advanced visualization settings that make it a formidable option for people looking to view medical images on their Mac computer. The free open source software is attractive for looking at DICOM studies quickly and safely.
However, when it comes to storing those studies, Horos might start to falter. The Horos software is not intended for long-term storage of medical images and will slow down as it fills with studies. The software is also designed to only work on Mac computers, limiting the reach of your images. When you begin to run into these issues, it might be imperative to consider alternatives such as Purview Solutions.
Topics: Purview Solutions, What Can Horos Do, The Horos Project
Transferring patients between hospitals is a common occurrence at community hospitals and tertiary care facilities. Although not enough is known about the burden this puts on our healthcare system, it has been estimated that 1.6 million inpatients originated at another facility,1 including 1.5% of all admitted Medicare patients.2 Despite the high volume of patient transfers, there is no structured way to ensure that the patients medical records arrive along with them to the receiving institution. This has posed significant, and even life threatening outcomes, but is there a solution?
