DURHAM, NC – Heart IT and Johns Hopkins Medicine recently announced the award of a $2.25M grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to enable the inclusion of medical images in the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN).

NHIN, a federal initiative of the National Office of the Coordinator for Health Information Technology, is being developed to provide a secure, nationwide, interoperable health information infrastructure that will connect providers, consumers, and others involved in supporting healthcare. This critical part of the national health agenda will enable health information to follow the consumer, be available for clinical decision-making, and support appropriate use of healthcare information beyond direct patient care to improve health.

Heart IT explains the significance of the grant work this way: According to the Government Accountability Office, 75 percent of all imaging procedures are performed outside of hospitals where PACS systems are practically non-existent. The smaller healthcare providers are not able to afford a PACS solution. Cost is the top barrier to adopt health information technology. However, the NHIN requires a PACS to share medical images. This implies that the most medical images – 75 percent of them – will not be available. Therefore, it is clear that a cost effective imaging solution is paramount as it can provide PACS capabilities to those smaller providers that cannot afford it.

Durham, N.C.-based Heart IT pioneered the first FDA approved, zero footprint medical imaging workstation. WebPAX offers PACS capability via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model through Web 2.0 technologies that allow any Internet web browser to function as a medical imaging workstation without the need to install client software.

The technology includes zoom/pan, movie controls, distance measurements and regions of interest. Heart IT has proposed this technology as a SaaS PACS for smaller providers in order to enable them to share and access images via the NHIN.

Heart IT will collaborate with Johns Hopkins Medicine and its member hospitals to develop a prototype of this technology and demonstrate its value and capabilities within NHIN.