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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is issuing a request for information, seeking ways to improve the access, exchange and use of electronic imaging information through the ONC Health IT Certification Program.
WHY IT MATTERS
The RFI from the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy/Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology was announced with an ASTP/ONC blog post on Thursday.
The request, Diagnostic Imaging Interoperability Standards and Certification, invites the public to comment on how standards and certification criteria can support the exchange of diagnostic images for the benefit of patients and providers.
The agency's leader has deep experience with medical imaging and said he wants to make diagnostic image data more accessible to the providers and patients who need them.
"As a radiologist, I rely on diagnostic images to guide decisions about patients’ health," said Tom Keane, assistant secretary for technology policy and national coordinator for health IT, in a statement. "Imaging has become central to patient management, and as such, the ability to access images at the point of care is critical."
Comments will help inform considerations for potential future standards and certification criteria for future rulemaking, he noted.
"Let us know what is working, what is not, and how an optimal, yet unrealized, future state can be architected by regulation, reimbursement, and private sector coordination," he said in the post.
Comments are due 45 days (March 16) after publication of the RFI in the Federal Register, which is expected on Friday.
THE LARGER TREND
Image sharing has long been a sticky wicket across U.S. healthcare, even for providers working with the most advanced electronic health record systems and linked with health information exchange networks.
Most providers have moved from films to picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), but the sharing of medical images between different institutions is still a challenge. The secure exchange of medical images requires cloud-based image-sharing platforms, encrypted PACS-to-PACS and potentially virtual private networks – which still leaves many providers still asking patients to bring along physical media, like CDs.
With high-resolution 3D imaging medical images, such as CT scans, relying on the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) imaging standard, the file sizes can be massive.
Some tools enable image technicians to convert videos of patients' 3D models, or the 3D datasets themselves, into standardized DICOM files for viewing in PACS, but even within a health system, viewing can be problematic.
Health systems such as Carle Health use enterprise imaging systems to consolidate all imaging into one repository accessible by all specialties through a single viewer.
Dr. Doug Morton, a neuroradiologist at Carle Foundation Hospital, a Level 1 trauma and comprehensive stroke center in Urbana, Illinois, said the health system needed a centralized vendor-neutral archive for all imaging, including point-of-care ultrasound, scope images and digital pathology – without changing existing clinical workflows.
"I could not see a patient's cardiology or ophthalmology images, a cardiologist could not see the patient's radiology images, and so on," he told Healthcare IT News last year.
"Before the VNA, most providers using a PACS viewer could access only radiology images," he explained. "Now, all radiology and cardiology images from every hospital in our health system are stored in the VNA."
ON THE RECORD
"Ensuring those images move seamlessly between care teams means those answers can come faster, with greater accuracy and at a lower cost," said Keane in the blog post.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
