Why Specialist Doctors Shouldn't Rely on a Hospital PACS
It's understandable why subspecialists might default to using a hospital's picture archiving and communication system (PACS) rather than a system of their own.
Posts by:
Les Trachtman, EE, JD, MBA
As Managing Director of Purview, Les Trachtman drives Purview’s shared mission to improve medical outcomes and access to quality medical expertise for millions of people, regardless of geography. Les is a seasoned entrepreneur, educator, and author with over four decades of experience in strategy, consulting, and start-ups. Les is also an adjunct instructor at the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School, where he shares his years of experience and insights with the next generation of business leaders. He is a frequent guest lecturer at Harvard Business School, MIT and other academic institutions, as well as a board member of The Metro Group. Les is also known as the author of the Amazon bestseller "Don't F**K It Up, How Founders and Their Successors Can Avoid the Cliches that Inhibit Growth", and a blogger on founder succession and other topics. He is passionate about sailing, traveling, and challenging the status quo.
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How to Get Paid for Remote Expert Opinions
There is a growing list of hospitals adopting online or remote second opinions (RSOs). Second opinions, in general, are becoming more accepted by both patients and physicians, and telemedicine or remote medical encounters are becoming increasingly popular. This has led patients who are diagnosed with critical medical issues to seek ways to avail themselves of specialty medical knowledge and experience from providers that are not necessarily local to them.
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Connection to Core Systems for Remote Second Opinion Programs
Many hospitals that are completing the early stages of adoption of remote second opinion (RSO) systems may now be thinking through the integration of this system with their downstream systems. Most of the work performed by RSOs is intentionally performed outside of the hospital's EHR, PACS, pathology, or other electronic clinical records storage systems. However, should a patient that receives a remote second opinion visit the hospital for a procedure or inpatient visit, these records will need to become part of the hospital's permanent patient file.
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Build vs Buy: Enterprise Medical Software
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.
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Strategies for Improving Medical Record Exchange for Patient Transfer
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?
