The healthcare landscape is evolving and there is a greater need to focus on delivering stellar patient care, driving costs down, and reducing complexity at every level of operations. Enterprise imaging is at the heart of the hospital and is one of the richest data warehouses in the healthcare ecosystem.
However, managing imaging data storage and accessibility has emerged as one of the largest concerns for health systems and imaging organizations. Conventional imaging storage practices that leverage on-premise vendor-neutral archives (VNAs) are costly to maintain and update, can leave imaging data vulnerable to security threats and pose accessibility issues due to downtime and scalability limitations.
To address providers’ storage, capacity and cost concerns, Change Healthcare, a leading healthcare technology company, embarked on a journey to develop the only major cloud-native, fully-managed SaaS enterprise imaging offering called Change Healthcare Enterprise Imaging NetworkTM (EIN). Change Healthcare compiled a team of leading experts; including enterprise architects, cloud development engineers, product management, IT, Change Healthcare leadership, key customer development partners, and Google engineers, to build a cloud-native enterprise imaging solution. This entailed building code from scratch as opposed to lift-and-shift environments in which existing code is repurposed in a cloud environment.
Designing a system specifically for cloud, while more time-consuming, ensures scalability and security. During its development, the EIN team set three key objectives for this solution: enhance care, reduce cost and reduce complexity.
Enhancing Patient Care:
Our primary objective when starting this journey was to improve the lives of our customers and the patients they serve. With the patient care delivery in mind, EIN applications - EIN Archive, EIN Viewer and EIN Analytics – provide security-enabled access to imaging records, anywhere and at anytime, that both enhance collaboration among care teams and help improve diagnostic confidence. EIN Archive is both the conduit between the local network and the cloud-native vendor-neutral data management service and the service itself. This service enables provider access to patient imaging records securely and simply within their natural workflows and is available anytime, anywhere. EIN Viewer is a zero-footprint universal viewer for care team coordination and collaboration. It grants providers security-enabled access to patient information, images, and reports, at any time from any place, for fast, efficient communication and collaboration. EIN Analytics is built from the ground up to automate the collection and aggregation of large, complex data sets for the delivery of smart, actionable insights specifically for imaging, providing leaders with the whole story for the healthcare system and the individual patient.
Reducing Cost:
While on-premise data storage solutions are expensive and difficult to maintain, migrating to the cloud also poses a challenge for customers. Historically, migrating data and information stored in VNAs was an extremely arduous and expensive task that could take years to accomplish. Our team recognized that EIN had to reduce the cost of both migrating to a cloud-native solution and maintaining ongoing operations. To do this, we consolidated systems, hardware, and infrastructure. We simplified the imaging workflow to eliminate redundant IT infrastructure, applications, and siloed data storage. A centralized system in the cloud reduces cost in two ways - eliminating the upfront and recurring cost of hardware and application maintenance and providing the appropriate amount of storage space with scaled pricing. With EIN, organizations are only paying for the storage that they are using. If data needs spike or dip, cloud-native storage can accommodate accordingly. Organizations no longer need to overprovision to account for a potential increase in data storage. Cloud-native technology reduces the time it takes to migrate storage solutions from several years to a mere matter of weeks by expanding the resources needed to migrate a large amount of data at first and subsequently scaling back to only what is needed for ongoing operations.
Reducing Complexity:
It was critical that the EIN system be interoperable and integrate seamlessly with electronic health records (EHR), a major pain point for customers. EHRs hold the patient’s healthcare story, adds context to the imaging data and supports providers in reaching a confident diagnosis and tailored care plan. EIN seamlessly integrates with major EHR systems and can leverage HL7 and FHIR to integrate with other EHR systems as needed. Streamlined, cloud-native enterprise imaging also positively impacts cybersecurity. We are able to quickly deploy operating system updates and security patches much more frequently (on average 4 to 6 weeks) and efficiently (zero downtime) compared to traditional imaging storing solutions. In addition to enhanced security, these updates allow organizations to innovate at a much faster rate, offering the ability to incorporate the latest technology into their enterprise imaging processes as soon as it is available.
Since EIN’s development, we have deployed this solution with healthcare organizations varying in size from large IDNs to small hospitals and have been able to successfully ingest 1 million studies in one day from a single customer and deliver 13 upgrades with zero downtime. EIN is changing the way imaging data is stored, retrieved, analyzed and displayed. It provides organizations with a security-enabled, single-platform solution that streamlines clinical workflows, improves labor and IT utilization, agile updates, and cybersecurity and data storage.