Medical Imaging in the Cloud: A Conversation About eMix

Over the past few weeks I've been talking to staff at DR Systems about medical imaging in the cloud. DR Systems boasts of offering the first cloud solution for sharing medical images, called eMix. According to my contact Michael Trambert, Lead Radiologist for PACS Reengineering for the Cottage Health System and Sansum Clinic in Santa Barbara, California, eMix started off by offering storage for both images and the reports generated by radiologists, cardiologists, and other imaging specialists. It then expanded to include other medical records in HL7, CDA, CCR, PDF, RTF, and plain text formats. It is vendor neutral, thanks to DICOM (a standard that covers both images and reports) and HL7.

First a bit of background (some of which I offered in an earlier posting). In the U.S., currently, an estimated 30 billion dollars are wasted each year through re-imagining that could be avoided. In addition to cost, there are many reasons to cut down on images: many systems expose patients to small amounts of radiation that pose a cumulative risk over time, and in an emergency situation it's better to reuse a recent image than to waste time taking another...