Other software systems are also used in conjunction with PACS, and increasingly need to be interoperable with PACS, including RIS, Image Sharing, Archival, Post Processing, and Computer Aided Diagnosis:
. RIS or Radiology Information System software supports workflow, such as appointments, patient registration, work-lists and reporting
. Image Sharing allows communicating outside of the hospital premises or to remote physicians, specialists or referring physicians, or teleradiologists. This has now been mandated by legislation (ACA and HITECH). Most PACS systems are proprietary and historically could not link to one another, so Image Sharing requires additional IT investment
. Storage and Archival - Exponential growth in the volume of data means that storage requirements continue to rise. Furthermore, US law requires healthcare providers to keep medical records for seven years. As such, PACS are often augmented with an offsite Archival system, generally at lower cost and slower access/higher latency.
. Vendor Neutral Archive concept was introduced to ensure operability with various PACS system, whereby the format and interface of the image archive is non vendor specific and follows established standard
. High Availability - PACS can become overloaded with simultaneous user requests, so that high availability solutions need to be in place for peak demand.
. Redundancy - PACS operation is mission critical and that redundant solutions need to be in place for coping with catastrophic failures, or even outages of the IT components. Failures could include power failure or hardware malfunction, or a more serious catastrophe such as a fire, flood or others.
. 3D Post Processing and Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) are other PACS add-on solutions required for certain routine procedures such as cardiac analysis and mammography. These applications rely on having the complete exam set available, are computationally intensive, and require specialized workstations.
. Dictatation software using Voice Recognition has become the standard for accepting voice input from a radiologist for report generation
. Computer Networks - Growth of scan data places ever increasing burdens on software and network efficiency in storing, retrieving or manipulating images. Provider premises are generally connected through Local Area Network connections at typical speeds of 1 Gbps, and many are considering expensive upgrades to 10 Gbps to enable moving medical scans. Physicians need powerful PCs or expensive custom workstations to manipulate the data on existing medical imaging systems when utilizing an onsite PACS system.
Conclusion: With the range of services and products available in the market to address the above requirements, managing medical scans is increasingly burdensome and costly to healthcare providers, but KJAYA Medical has a solution. KJAYA has built a specialized cloud for medical imaging uniquely based on gaming technology and artificial intelligence to consolidate the above requirements.
The Volumina® Cloud platform provides KJAYA's team and 3rd Party developers with the immense processing power for developing demanding medical imaging application, Internet bandwidth, and redundancy and high availability of customer's data through multiple geographical location hosting. The new paradigm of combining access and storage so that the entire medical applications can solely reside on the cloud, removes the need to transmit raw scans to end user and enables front end application to run on any device. Neural network and genetic algorithms that are basis of artificial intelligence can be used to run on powerful gaming hardware to enhance analytics and intelligence of the clinical application. This is the foundation that our platform is built upon.
Healthcare provider benefits from a simple and powerful PACS, RIS, Image Sharing, Archive, 3D post processing, CAD, high availability and redundancy system:
. Reduced image management costs to cope with reimbursement reductions
. Accelerated image management performance
. Improved producivity through efficient workflow
. Facilitation of a worldwide medical imaging information exchange
. Availability of diagnostic viewing and interpreation anytime, anywhere
. Improved patient care and safety
. Ability of diagnostic viewing and interpretation of anytime, anywhere
. Enhance accountability to payers and patients
. Improvement of availability of medical images and results to patients