Interest rising to connect pathology, other departments to enterprise imaging systems
In the past decade, the trend toward enterprise imaging has mainly focused on connecting the various modalities in radiology into one centralized image and report repository. This is designed to enable easier access to imaging in the electronic medical record (EMR) and easier workflows across imaging. However, many hospital systems are how using enterprise imaging systems to connect many other "ologies" from departments across the healthcare enterprise.
This movement to consolidate images and other data into one location has expanded to cardiologycould soon hit digital pathology as more hospitals adopt digital slide scanner technology. Beyond these three big users, nearly all health system clinical departments produce images, and hospitals are finding it easier from an IT prospective to integrate the imaging data into one bucket rather than manage dozens of other data storage systems.
Health Imaging spoke with Amy Thompson, a senior analyst at Signify Research, about connecting various departments to enterprise imaging systems. She said all large PACS vendors now have some sort of enterprise imaging offering, or it is in their technology roadmap. While there is still a big demand for standalone radiology PACS systems, interest in enterprise imaging is growing.
"In the past it has been interest in consolidating enterprise radiology, and typically it has not included cardiology, pathology, oncology, or whatever it might be. But what we are now seeing more and more in the market is vendors having that visibility and strategy of bringing in those disparate systems, and really looking at consolidating and centralizing everything into one platform to provide that single user experience to really help drive collaboration," Thompson said.
The movement to consolidate pathology into enterprise imaging
Europe is leading in the adoption of digital pathology enterprise imaging. But, Thompson said there will likely be wider adoption in the United States because of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) relaxing the approval process for combined scanner and software technologies, which is at the core of the digital pathology workflow.
Digital pathology is also getting additional recognition after the release of 13 new CPT codes in the summer of 2022. Thompson said these codes are mainly being used to track the use of digital pathology, but will have more meaning financially for health systems if they become Category 1 CPT codes in the future.
"It's a step in the right direction and demonstrating the openness of the U.S. market is having toward that digitization of pathology," Thompson explained.
She said several U.S. health IT vendors have already made sizable investments to add digital pathology to their enterprise imaging platforms. This includes partnerships with some of the best-of-breed digital pathology vendors. This was also evident at the 2022 meetings for the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) and Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) meetings, and at the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2023 meeting.
"We attended SIIM 2022, and it was one of the first conferences where we saw digital pathology discussed at a radiology informatics show. It was great to hear the discussion around how the market wants to integrated these two ologies together and how that will work," Thompson said.
Find more observations about the enterprise imaging market from Signify Research in these interviews:
5 key trends in PACS and enterprise imaging from Signify Research
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Dave Fornell has covered healthcare for more than 17 years, with a focus in cardiology and radiology. Fornell is a 5-time winner of a Jesse H. Neal Award, the most prestigious editorial honors in the field of specialized journalism. The wins included best technical content, best use of social media and best COVID-19 coverage. Fornell was also a three-time Neal finalist for best range of work by a single author. He produces more than 100 editorial videos each year, most of them interviews with key opinion leaders in medicine. He also writes technical articles, covers key trends, conducts video hospital site visits, and is very involved with social media. E-mail: dfornell@innovatehealthcare.com