Vaultara Blog

Technology needs in healthcare are constantly evolving. Security, accessibility, and compliance are at the top of everyone's priority list because patient privacy is a must-have, but having the right information at the right time is of equal importance. With the recent popularity of cloud services in several other industries, healthcare organizations must decide which of their systems - if any - are appropriate for the cloud. In the case of medical imaging, CDs and DVDs can be a cumbersome and unreliable method for sharing images. For this reason, many hospitals and imaging centers have begun looking into on-premise or cloud solutions to streamline their image sharing efforts. As with any important decision, they must weigh the pros and cons of each option. The top three things to consider when selecting an on-premise or cloud-based medical image sharing software are cost, data, and control. Let’s look at each in a bit more detail...  

As a patient, few things are more frustrating than getting a CD of your medical images and not being able to read them when you get home. Even worse is having this happen when you’re trying to share them with another provider.

Debra Moulton ran into this problem back in 2013 when she had an MRI performed on her neck. She’d been suffering from persistent, severe pain and after numerous treatments like steroid injections and physical therapy, her doctor finally agreed to do an MRI. She was scheduled to see a neurosurgeon for a consultation and was told to bring a copy of the test on a disc. At home, she attempted to look over the results on the CD that her doctor provided. First, she tried to load them on her desktop computer, but had no luck. Next, she tried on her laptop computer, and still nothing. After several tries, she grew frustrated. As it turned out, the files on the CD were corrupt. She called her doctor’s office to see what they could do and learned she would have to get a new copy. Fortunately, the imaging center had one on file and quickly provided a free replacement since it wasn’t her fault that the disc was corrupted. Unfortunately, Debra encountered this problem again when she required a few more tests. Just as before, the doctor put the results on CDs. “It never fails,” she said. “Every time I tried to access the images from home or at another doctor’s office, I would have the same issues.”

The healthcare industry’s commitment to patient engagement has been one of the catalysts for a renewed focus on health information accessibility. Accessibility and interoperability are often discussed in terms of electronic medical records, but what about medical images, specifically? Not long ago, in the days of film, exchanging medical images across facilities was very cumbersome (if not impossible) and sharing them with patients simply did not happen. But even now that it has become commonplace for imaging studies to be burned onto discs, there are still accessibility challenges that plague the process.

Image Sharing with CDs

Discs are currently the most commonly used physical media for sharing medical images. A proprietary viewer is a software that can read and display images in their standard DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) format. For consistency across imaging platforms, as well as security of patient data, medical images cannot be accessed in this format without the use of the appropriate viewing software. Herein lies one of the fundamental issues with this method of image sharing. If a CD only holds image files, it’s not guaranteed that they can be viewed from any computer because the computer might lack the necessary software to view them. If a CD holds both the image files and a proprietary viewer that needs to be installed, the viewing software must be compatible with the computer or operating system on which it’s being installed and the user must have the appropriate permissions to complete that installation.