Health Care Reform-Can the Medical Industry Enter the Digital Age
June 29, 2009 | Data Storage
Healthcare
With all the excitement about the health care reform and climbing costs of the entire health care system it’s amazing to consider that much of the health system still uses paper to administer patients records. The task is so monumental that it’s difficult to see how an entire industry can be reformed so soon. Current medical data systems are very much proprietary and do not share well with others. In order for the data conversion to take place it needs to be simplified for the health care professionals.
This may appear simple but the requirements of a software package that is
- secure
- reliable
- Can exchange data with other remote systems using high-level encryption
- modular: so various software interfaces can be developed with medical digital equipment and analog.
- Fast
- modular data storage
- Simplicity
- Can be easily deployed in medical offices.
Software aside the data storage requirements would really need to be mapped out on a local health care provider level and a On-line database for medical records. Essentially the local doctors records are uploaded every so often to a national database (or regional). Records would need to be scanned in or manually entered into a database in order to keep local copies current and the larger backup database that provides coverage to all subscribing agencies. This would be a non-profit type operation.
There are some medical “PACS “ currently available ( picture archiving and communication systems ) but there is no common image metadata platform. Meta data is the ‘tag’ that is often attached to a image that tells a wide range of information about the image. Data can also be added to the meta description to help identify the image changes. DICOM does not fully specify the ‘metadata’ tags stored with images to annotate and describe them, so integrators of medical imaging equipment have wide latitude to create DICOM-compliant files that differ in the meaning and representation of this metadata.
A feature common to most PACS is to read and store the metadata from all the images into a central database however the differences between integrators’ DICOM implementations make this a difficult task. It really appears to be a daunting task to even get the industry to convert to a common metatag or be able to ignore non-compliant data.
With several studies showing only 22% of PACS in health care and many doctors completely in the dark about how to go about converting it’s going to a be a task in line with building the pyramids.
Or building a superhighway for the health care of our nation.
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