Fujifilm discusses its next-generation, unified PACS viewer technology.
Every health care professional is regularly challenged to learn new technology. While we can all appreciate how innovations have helped improve patient care, radiology is one field where it can be difficult to keep up with the sheer volume of images generated.
Lacy
Osberger
It’s helpful to take a deep breath and look back at how far radiology has come in just a few decades. We can also recognize how much further the field can go with the development of exciting new tools like artificial intelligence (AI).
Specialists — radiologists and cardiologists, for instance — have a panoply of information and images available to them and, in the last few years, have found better and more efficient ways to process, analyze and interpret what they are seeing.
But it’s not always so easy to share that immense new cache of information with each other.
“Departments throughout the hospital are acquiring images and keeping them in those departments,” said Bill Lacy, vice president of Medical Informatics at FUJIFILM Medical Systems U.S.A., Inc. “They’re not being shared in the electronic health record (EHR).”
A cardiologist looking at a chest imaging study may not have the tools they need to access what radiologists have collected in their picture archiving and communication system (PACS). And they are likely missing other important clinical and historical data that is not readily available to them. Conversely, the radiologist cannot easily see the unique type of motion studies the cardiologists collect with their viewers.
“Departments within a health care system collect, share, and store patient data in so many different ways, which can prohibit the compilation of the complete patient picture. And more than that could potentially breach health system security protocols with local storing or caching of images, or not storing the clinical information and making it accessible in the EHR,” said Sara Osberger, senior director, Enterprise Imaging Marketing, FUJIFILM Medical Systems U.S.A., Inc.
Add to this the confusion and frustration of information technology (IT) professionals trying to deal with two different systems and two different sets of vendors.
“It’s a significant headache for IT because you also have to put in the hardware environments that are specific to different vendors and manage that complexity at the same time you’re managing all these different viewers that physicians would see,” Lacy said.
Fujifilm is one company aiming to meet this challenge with the introduction of Synapse® 7x, the most recent addition to its Synapse Enterprise Imaging portfolio, designed to cover all the different areas of diagnostic visualization and enterprise viewing.
Most specifically, Synapse 7x allows cardiologists and radiologists — who together account for 70% to 80% of a health care system’s imaging studies — to converge on the same viewer and architecture.
“Now both areas can see images without additional manipulation,” Lacy noted. “They’re all accessible in that one patient jacket, one imaging record.”
While the challenges that Synapse 7x is meeting are significant, the future is even more promising as Fujifilm continues the expansion into more specialty departments all while preparing for AI.
Lacy said Fujifilm’s will be one of the first systems fully enabled to use AI results within use cases in the viewer, and through communication tools within the system.
Visit the FUJIFILM Medical Systems USA, Inc. virtual booth at RSNA 2020.
