Momentum. You feel it when you’ve got it. And when it lags, you’re pushing harder to regain your stride. In radiology, maintaining momentum is core to keeping radiologists, workflow, decision-making and patient care moving forward. An enterprise imaging solution is the orchestrator that’s making it happen.

Enterprise Imaging has a new vision for eye care: Utilizing a single platform to streamline image viewing, analysis and storage and linking ophthalmology with other ‘ologies across the healthcare system. That vision is now a clinically proven reality as one platform unites eye care with other imaging exams across a large, U.S.-based healthcare system. Ophthalmologists and optometrists praise the solution for proving its value in eye disease diagnostics, care planning and patient outcomes—and now other healthcare systems can take advantage of it too.

Medical images have long lived on legacy spinning disk. But healthcare systems are now leaving behind those on-prem, awkward boxes that require too much real estate, IT support and expense. Cloud is the choice to support enterprise imaging. If it feels like healthcare cloud is everywhere, you’re right. And here’s what you need to know to do cloud right.

First there was PACS: picture archiving and communications systems. Over the last decade, as managing medical imaging has expanded far beyond radiology, enterprise imaging was born. But what is enterprise imaging in its best form?

What if artificial intelligence (AI) could support doctors in making decisions faster?

A vision starts with a need, quickly followed by a question—how can we accomplish it? At Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) in New York, the vision to initiate digital pathology coupled with fully integrating radiology and digital pathology images in one enterprise imaging (EI) system started seven years ago. They went live in February—the first U.S. installation of Sectra’s Digital Pathology Solution at the No. 1 orthopedic hospital in the country, 10 years running.

New Technology Add-On Payments (NTAP) are a class of reimbursement that are meant to help pay for new technology that is not included in the DRG bundled payment. Specifically, NTAP recognizes that current DRG payment rates can be a barrier to adopting new technology and represents an additional payment for hospital stays that use new technology determined by CMS to provide substantial clinical improvement and where the current DRG payment would be inadequate.

Last year the institutional leadership at Texas’s University Health System, which contracts with the UT Health San Antonio physician network, made the decision to move all inpatient imaging off the radiology department’s PACS and onto a new enterprise imaging (EI) platform. Their goal was internal consolidation.