Expert Advice, Articles & Blogs XiFin EXCELLENCE

Radiologists ARE the Technology Leaders within Healthcare

November 1, 2014

I recently attended the Radiology Business Managers Association’s (RBMA) fall educational conference in Seattle, Washington, where I had the pleasure of being a participant of a well-attended panel discussion addressing cloud-based products and what the cloud really is.  For those readers unaware of RBMA, this is a tremendous, communicative and well-managed organization that represents thousands of radiology administrators, coders and billers who have the responsibility of managing radiology group practices and imaging centers across the US. These folks are ultimately responsible for ensuring that their physicians get paid appropriately and in a timely fashion.  If you know anything about healthcare reimbursement, you quickly get a sense of how difficult their jobs can be.

As we answered questions throughout the panel discussion, I identified to the audience that cloud-based technologies within radiology should not be looked at as cutting-edge or new as the radiology segment of the healthcare industry has arguably adopted cloud solutions more rapidly than any other medical specialty within all of healthcare.  This should not be a surprise.  Radiologists have always been technology leaders within healthcare, pushing their vendors for the latest and greatest technologies.  One only needs to look at a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or positron emission tomography (PET) machine to get a sense of the technologies these physicians leverage on the clinical side to care for patients.  It’s even more true when we look at how radiologists share images through cloud-based picture archive communication systems (PACS) or the disrupting cloud-based vendor neutral archive (VNA) platforms that are outpacing PACS adoption 5 to 1.  Additionally, on the administrative side, computer-assisted coding products (a product that leverages natural language processing technology to read a radiology report just as a human coder does to produce compliant ICD-9/10 and CPT codes) have been in the cloud – for 15 years.

That being said, there did seem to be some confusion within the audience of what exactly the Cloud really is. So even within a tech-savvy segment like Radiology, the recent trend of vendors jumping on the cloud bandwagon has served to confuse the matter.  So what is the cloud in simple terms and how can you recognize if a product is in the cloud? 

Gartner defines the Cloud as: “A style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to customers using Internet technologies.” Many companies only get this far—they port legacy technology to make it accessible via the Internet through programs such as Citrix, which leverages the Internet to connect to hardware on a private, internal network and  then promote themselves as being cloud based or “private cloud based.” Cloud computing includes five key items: yes, it must use Internet technologies, but it also needs to be service-based, scalable and elastic, shared, and metered by use.  Taken in whole, these five attributes spell out a paradigm shift that unlocks capabilities and information in entirely new ways. 

For example, cloud-based solutions build their architecture on the Internet platform specifically to allow for other cloud-based solutions to interact and ascertain specific data elements from those solutions.  This is how interoperability works and why the government is establishing meaningful use requirements and regulation.  The only way healthcare is going to be able to communicate city to city, state to state or country to country is through interoperability and the only way we can accomplish interoperability is through Cloud based solutions. 

So what does this mean and how does it work? 

When I asked the RBMA Fall Educational Conference audience, by show of hands, how many of them had purchased AND tracked a package for delivery from Amazon there was an overwhelming response of hands raised.  When you purchase an item on Amazon and click to track your FedEx package you are accessing a single component of FedEx’s logistics software via a communication protocol identified in the tech world as web services to gain insights to where your package is and when it will arrive.  Specifically within radiology this can be seen by utilizing web service calls to verify eligibility, real-time claim status or real-time updates to outstanding A/R through patient payments via web-based payment methods.  Through this interoperability, we see reduction of costs and increased productivity because cloud-based solutions are communicating with each other in real-time versus having a human manually research for data.  An analogy of this is the Automate Teller Machine (ATM).  Ask a Millennial what a bank teller is and you’ll probably get a blank stare, but ask them what a web service is and how it works at an ATM and you’ll probably get an answer on how two computer systems are speaking to each other to identify if there are enough funds available for a withdrawal—anywhere in the world.  Point being, there is reduction of labor costs and valuable time saved when utilizing an ATM versus walking into a bank to make a transaction with a human, known as a bank teller.

As we move into a consumer driven healthcare environment, patients are going to expect and demand that their physicians have real-time access to patient records anywhere in the world.  Additionally, just as they are able to make a payment anywhere in the world, patients are going to expect our provider and payer claim systems to speak appropriately with each other identifying proper benefits, deductibles, co-pays and payments. There are tremendous benefits from cloud-based software solutions that were built from the ground up to be a cloud-based solution. Software vendors can’t simply port their existing software to the cloud as the software’s architecture must be overhauled, which requires a comprehensive re-write of the software to support Internet protocols, etc. 

Healthcare is starting to realize the benefits of cloud-based solutions, not just in radiology, but throughout healthcare.  And as we move into a consumer driven healthcare environment, the general population will start to demand greater and greater access to all of their medical data and not only through desktops, but on their mobile devices.  There is only one way radiology providers will continue to be the tech savvy leaders within healthcare and that is through their continued adoption of leading technology solutions that reside in the cloud.

Sign up for Blog Alerts