A recent Association for the Advancement 
of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) survey asked clinical engineers and biomedical engineering technicians to name the top challenges at their hospitals. As a measure of its multiple impacts on the way medical facilities currently operate, eMix – and in general, cloud-based sharing of medical information – addressed three of the challenges ranked in the top ten.
The top-ranked issue was interfacing between devices and information systems. This is hardly surprising, considering the vast array of IT devices and systems needed to run a state-of-the-art medical facility. With so many manufacturers selling proprietary technology, it takes a monumental effort just to get one hospital's IT components talking to each other. Then there's the added challenge of moving data between hospitals.
A lot of interfacing can be avoided just by using a system like eMix to leapfrog over the proprietary hurdles. As a vendor-neutral solution, eMix eliminates the need for costly interfaces in many circumstances. And now with its EMRconnectTM option, eMix has moved beyond medical imaging and into the realm of HL7. Any document that can be sent via HL7 – imaging reports, lab reports, and so on – can be moved around via eMix without the capital expense of an HL7 interface.
The second-ranked challenge on the AAMI survey was “maintaining computerized IT systems.” eMix can significantly reduce a facility's IT maintenance budget or free up IT staff for other duties if the facility uses virtual private networks (VPNs). Many hospitals deploy VPNs as a workaround solution when they need to execute regular file transfers to other hospitals with IT systems that don't talk to theirs.
Earlier this year, we interviewed Amy Radonich, Assistant Director, Imaging Services at UC San Diego Medical Center (UCSD) about the problems with VPNs. She estimated that IT staff at her facility spent one to two days per month, per VPN, to maintain the hospitals six or seven VPNs. That's up to 14 working days per month by a $90,000/year employee, just for this one task. All of that can be avoided by using eMix, which UCSD now does.
Yes, the driving reason that UCSD flew to the cloud was clinical, because the hospital is a Level 1 trauma center that receives patients from throughout its region. eMix has made it possible to get transfer patients' files quickly to UCSD doctors so diagnosis and treatment planning can begin even before the patient arrives. But the time and labor savings from avoided maintenance haven't hurt.
The third item on the AAMI list that eMix addresses is “managing the radiation dose from CT.” eMix can't reduce the radiation from any single scan but it can certainly play a role in minimizing redundant scans, as we've emphasized many times, including here. To read an article about the survey in CMIO, click here.