[{"innerBlocks":[],"name":"core\/freeform","postId":1865,"blockType":{"name":"core\/freeform","keywords":[],"attributes":{"content":{"type":"string","source":"raw"},"lock":{"type":"object"}},"providesContext":[],"usesContext":[],"selectors":[],"supports":{"className":false,"customClassName":false,"reusable":false},"styles":[],"variations":[],"apiVersion":3,"title":"Classic","description":"Use the classic WordPress editor.","category":"text"},"originalContent":"The move by St. Louis-based Mercy to implement an enterprise imaging platform aims to improve the efficiency of its radiologists, while enabling the four-state health system to handle the expanding use of imaging technologies.

Those needs are massive\u2014over the past 10 years, the organization has amassed 25 million imaging exams, encompassing 800 terabytes of storage.

Over the next year, Mercy plans to transition its images from a vendor neutral archive to the Visage 7 Open Archive. When the transition is completed, it\u2019s expected to be one of the largest medical imaging archives in North America.

Mercy expects to gain numerous benefits from the transition, says Larry Aubry, vice president of business partnerships within Mercy Technology Services, the IT consulting and services arm of the delivery system. Radiologists, for example, will be able to more quickly access all of a patient\u2019s past imaging exams from the platform.

Speed of access to imaging studies was being hampered by the Mercy\u2019s previous approach, which involved using nine separate legacy picture archiving and communications systems (PACS)\u2014it will assimilate a tenth different PACS when it completes the acquisition of another hospital in the next few months.

\u201cThe new strategy prompted Mercy to move to a deconstructed PACS strategy, with the installation of Visage\u2019s viewing solution and a workflow solution from Medicalis completing in March 2017,\u201d Aubry says. \u201cAs a result, radiologists have gained between 30 and 50 percent efficiency.\u201d Now, Mercy will migrate to the Visage open archive, which is a core component to the enterprise imaging platform.

The new platform also will enable Mercy to scale in anticipation of future growth, both of the delivery system and as Mercy Technical Services offers technical services to healthcare organizations that contract with it.

The new platform will enable the organization to take in and distribute images from other specialties, such as cardiology, ophthalmology and more, says Toni Dudley, executive director of clinical systems for Mercy Technology Services.

Images from different modalities, such as point-of-care ultrasound and cardiology, don\u2019t conform to other imaging standards, but healthcare organizations are increasingly interested in being able to store these \u201c-ology\u201d images so they can be centrally stored and widely accessed through electronic health records systems.

Once the transition is complete, expected by the third quarter of 2019, the Visage platform will enable radiologists to instantly view images from a single platform on a number of different viewing devices, including mobile platforms, says Bobby Roe, director of solutions architecture and customer experience for Visage.

The company is also working on expanding the ability of the platform to incorporate artificial intelligence to support radiologists. Its platform can use algorithms from third-party sources, but the company is also working on its own, which will be able to be deployed to run in the background on images.

The algorithms will help support care by looking for incidental findings that radiologists don\u2019t have the time to pursue, Roe says. \u201cAt some point, there may be tens of thousands of AI algorithms that may be run against each image,\u201d he says. \u201cThe findings will need to be managed and displayed in a meaningful way for radiologists.\u201d

The Visage platform will run on Mercy\u2019s data centers. Visage also provides backup and redundancy capabilities, providing additional protection in case of disaster or data loss, Aubry says.","saveContent":"The move by St. Louis-based Mercy to implement an enterprise imaging platform aims to improve the efficiency of its radiologists, while enabling the four-state health system to handle the expanding use of imaging technologies.

Those needs are massive\u2014over the past 10 years, the organization has amassed 25 million imaging exams, encompassing 800 terabytes of storage.

Over the next year, Mercy plans to transition its images from a vendor neutral archive to the Visage 7 Open Archive. When the transition is completed, it\u2019s expected to be one of the largest medical imaging archives in North America.

Mercy expects to gain numerous benefits from the transition, says Larry Aubry, vice president of business partnerships within Mercy Technology Services, the IT consulting and services arm of the delivery system. Radiologists, for example, will be able to more quickly access all of a patient\u2019s past imaging exams from the platform.

Speed of access to imaging studies was being hampered by the Mercy\u2019s previous approach, which involved using nine separate legacy picture archiving and communications systems (PACS)\u2014it will assimilate a tenth different PACS when it completes the acquisition of another hospital in the next few months.

\u201cThe new strategy prompted Mercy to move to a deconstructed PACS strategy, with the installation of Visage\u2019s viewing solution and a workflow solution from Medicalis completing in March 2017,\u201d Aubry says. \u201cAs a result, radiologists have gained between 30 and 50 percent efficiency.\u201d Now, Mercy will migrate to the Visage open archive, which is a core component to the enterprise imaging platform.

Mercy’s imaging platform to speed access to wide range of studies

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