CHICAGO – Officials at Accenture and AT&T have launched a new medical imaging solution they say will help hospitals access medical images and doctors to collaborate.
The new technology, unveiled Monday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago, will enhance the capabilities of health professionals and radiologists to electronically share, review and store medical images, such as X-rays and CT or MRI scans, through AT&T technologies, the companies announced.
According to AT&T, the The Accenture Medical Imaging Solution, enabled by AT&T, can help medical professionals review patient images almost instantly, allow radiologists to see more patients and improve long-term technology costs and profitability.
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The solution can also enable national hospital networks to centrally manage medical images and collaborate efficiently with other institutions, physicians and radiologists, AT&T officials said.
The Accenture Medical Imaging Solution will be offered to U.S. hospitals and will be able to support capabilities that include:
- Workflow Analysis and Enablement – The Accenture benefit assessment and optimization analysis is a process that helps hospitals and other care providers connected by this solution to share their capacity for storing medical images and information. The offer includes features that can help hospitals efficiently manage radiology services.
- Teleradiology Exchange – The Accenture exchange will help to match supply and demand of radiology facilities and services. This can provide community-based hospitals with access to radiology services from medical centers, enabled by AT&T’s network and cloud hosting capabilities.
- Long-Term Image Management – The AT&T Medical Imaging and Information Management solution, a vendor-neutral, cloud-based service, helps providers to store, access, view and share patient medical images from virtually anywhere over a highly-secure infrastructure. The pay-as-you-go storage pricing helps providers to store medical images easily and avoid costly capital investment in storage infrastructure.
“Access to an accurate, cost-effective diagnosis will significantly improve all aspects of health delivery,” said Derek Danois, who leads medical imaging for Accenture Health. “Healthcare IT is an integral link in connecting clinical decisions and enabling an insight driven healthcare system.”
“Accenture’s systems integration experience coupled with AT&T’s cloud-based technologies means hospitals can have virtually real-time access to medical images while reducing healthcare costs,” said Randall Porter, assistant vice president, AT&T ForHealth.
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Industry experts say medical imaging management is one of the health industry’s biggest challenges, and providers increasingly are turning to cloud-based solutions. Roughly 73 percent of healthcare organizations plan to shift imaging data storage to the cloud, in some capacity, while 32 percent actively use some form of cloud solutions today, according to an Accenture study. The shift from analog to digital images has resulted in exponential growth in the amount of data that must be stored.
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