Bridging the technological and medical divide in imaging informatics

By Divya Chawla

Napier Healthcare, formerly Karishma Healthcare, organised the Napier India Medical Imaging Informatics Symposium on December 4, 2010 in New Delhi. The symposium was supported by Redington, Oracle and Barco, who provided their support as the Technology Partners. The symposium focussed on bridging the technological and medical divide in imaging informatics. The objective of the symposium was to help healthcare professionals choose the right single solution for enterprise-wide imaging informatics.

The seminar began with a talk on ‘PACS Challenge for the Indian Radiologist’ by Dr Avinash Nanivadekar, Chief Radiologist, Ruby Hall Clinic, Pune. Dr Nanivadekar called PACS a disruptive technology as its advent completely destroys the comfort of the existing technology. He said that though initially hospitals did not understand their need of PACS, radiologists are now getting aggressive with the use of technology. He said that the worst a hospital could do was choose a bad PACS vendor. He stated several reasons that justify the need of PACS in a particular hospital including lost films, data not archived, need for repeated examinations, transfer and storage issues, difficulty in identification, and so on.

The next presentation was on ‘Selecting Right PACS for Right Clinical Discipline; Vendor Neutral Archive’ by Dr Adam Chee, Chief Advocate (Director), Binary Healthcare. Dr Adam focussed his presentation on four critical aspects – imaging informatics essentials, health informatics ecosystem, tips on selecting right PACS and vendor neutral archive. He said that there is no standard core body of knowledge in medical imaging, which is a major drawback. Further, though everybody thinks that medical imaging informatics is limited to radiology, it is not. Also, PACS is not just limited to images – it is offers much more than that. He also spoke about the various types of PACS including – Mini PACS, Departmental PACS, Hospital PACS and Enterprise PACS.

Going further, Dr Balaji Ramachandran, Principal – Healthcare, Napier Healthcare, spoke on ‘EMR+PACS (1+1>2) and CDSS Value’. He said that lack of integration between EMR and PACS is a major challenge. Further there is a lack of clinical workflow support in EMR, automation, comprehensive textual metadata in medical images and image mining tools. He said that factors for success in any PACS related project include professional buy-in, innovative CIS, standardisation of quality of care, optimisation of quality vs cost ad integrated healthcare services.

Kulbhushan Chand, Director – Partner Solutions Centre, Oracle India made the final presentation of the day. He spoke about the worldwide presence of Oracle in the healthcare sector. Oracle’s solutions improve quality through health information exchange, business intelligence and security, access and identity management.

The day ended with video presentations from Barco and the launch of Dr Adam Chee’s book – ‘So you want to be a PACS administrator’ in the last segment.

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