New products entering the RIS market and vendors expanding their EMR and PACS client bases with integrated solutions suggest that radiology information systems are taking a renewed priority in purchasing decisions, a new report from research firm KLAS concludes.
The report ranks Epic, Siemens and McKesson as the favored RIS products for hospitals with more than 200 beds.
According to RIS in the Middle: The Integration Tug of War, decision makers are including RIS in discussion surrounding federal requirements for information exchange under the new meaningful use rules.
KLAS sees the decisions being pulled in three different directions depending on the facility's priorities:
- An integrated RIS/EMR strategy where data is housed on a common clinical platform;
- An integrated RIS/PACS for the imaging department; or
- A feature rich standalone RIS solution capable of being implemented and interfaced within the existing environment.
Some in radiology believe that an integrated RIS/PACS setup is a silver bullet, marrying integration with end-user functionality, says Ben Brown, the author of the report. On the other hand, IT administrators push for RIS/EMR solutions in order to build a patient-centric workflow across the organization.
Both strategies have pros and cons, and both must still have an interface – either the RIS/PACS to the EMR or the RIS/EMR to the PACS, Brown notes.
"End users may feel they have to sacrifice a certain level of functionality and customization in order to get enterprise integration," Brown says. "Often operational tools such as scheduling and procedural reporting are strong, but high-end functionality that aids radiologists and administrators with management reporting and analyzing patient information can be lacking."
Community hospitals and ambulatory organizations tend to be a mixed bag of standalone solutions, integrated RIS/PACS, and integrated RIS/EMR. Several RIS vendors have tailored their offerings to the specific needs of this market. Decisions for clinics tend be dominated by the radiology department and lean more towards the PACS/RIS integration with deeper operational functionality for the radiologists, according to the report.
Sixty-three percent of respondents indicate their RIS has necessary functionality currently, but providers list four key functionality items on their RIS wish list. Among them are management reporting tools, flexible scheduling, rollout of promised mammography tools and critical test results management functionality.
Among the twenty-three RIS solutions tracked in the KLAS report, Epic Radiant ranked at the top for large hospitals (200+ beds) with an overall performance score of 82.0 out of 100. Siemens syngo Workflow and McKesson Radiology Manager ranked second and third, respectively.
Avreo interWORKS and NovaRad NovaRIS tied for the highest score (83.3) in the community hospital market segment with GE Centricity RIS-IC taking the third highest ranked position.
FUJIFILM Synapse Information System was the highest ranked ambulatory RIS system with an overall score of 87.8, followed by Swearingen Software RISynergy in second place and MedInformatix RIS in third.
