How to support healthcare modernization with Cloud PACS using AWS Marketplace

In this blog post, I will share the key takeaways from the AWS webinar, How to support modernization with Cloud PACS through AWS Marketplace. I will show how healthcare organizations are using cloud-native picture archiving and communication system (PACS) solutions and how AWS Marketplace can help accelerate your time to value with PACS solutions.

AWS Marketplace is a digital software catalog that simplifies the discovery, purchase, and deployment of third-party software by focusing on quick deployment and flexible pricing. Curated healthcare solutions in AWS Marketplace can help you enhance patient care, lower costs, and improve efficiency. Recent third-party research found that it takes an average of just 27 hours to find, buy, and deploy a solution using AWS Marketplace, compared with 52.4 hours through other procurement sources. That is an average time savings of 49 percent.

Why organizations are turning to the cloud for PACS

Healthcare organizations must improve services quickly while increasing revenue and lowering costs. One example where this is true is with adoption of cloud-native PACS. A cloud-native PACS eliminates the wait for hardware procurement and setup while enabling faster time to value. Infrastructures can be spun up in minutes rather than weeks, which accelerates your revenue stream. In addition, a cloud PACS removes the guesswork and costs of designing for peak demands or under-provisioning infrastructure. You can easily expand or shrink your technology footprint based on need and only pay for what you use.

Interoperability and accessibility

Interoperability and accessibility are other benefits behind the push to cloud adoption in healthcare, and PACS in particular. The ability to pull patients’ medical records and share that information anytime and anywhere is becoming an imperative. AWS has 24 Regions around the world with 77 Availability Zones to help you provide the best experience and scale easily to address those challenges.

Business continuity and disaster recovery

As healthcare organizations experience increased security and ransomware incidents, they are seeking more cost-effective approaches to improving business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR). Many traditional PACS solutions have stored the DR infrastructure in another location on campus or just down the street. The benefits of quicker accessibility through the cloud are now challenging many of these organizations to rethink how they manage BC and DR in the cloud.

Machine learning for medical imaging

With increasing demand for fast medical imaging, healthcare organizations are also increasingly interested in the opportunities found in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The technology requirements for medical exams are growing exponentially, both in the number of images and the amount of data created. The cloud provides a more efficient way to run the AI/ML analysis and feed the results into PACS workflows rather than procuring large amounts of infrastructure to support each use case.

How healthcare providers are using AWS Marketplace to achieve their business goals

If nothing else, the global COVID pandemic has shown that the cloud plays a critical role in helping organizations to increase agility and reduce business costs. As cloud demand increases among healthcare providers, it is important to consider some ways that AWS and AWS Marketplace can help address your challenges.

Use case 1: the University of Cincinnati manages secure, large-scale research trials using Ambra Health PACS

The University of Cincinnati used Ambra Health to automate its process of managing medical imaging for clinical trials. Ambra Health is a medical data and image management company. It offers a PACS solution in AWS Marketplace that provides cloud backup and archive capabilities to reduce business continuity risk. Using Ambra, the university securely uploads, anonymizes, and matches imaging data with non-imaging clinical data. Ambra handles everything from setting up individual research folders to organizing large, multi-site research trials. The university can now customize timepoint fields, project users and roles, case report forms, and trial workflows. It also now enables secure upload and anonymization of trial data from sites around the world, rapid access to medical imaging, and the ability to send, receive, and store multimodal imaging data. With Ambra, the University of Cincinnati was able to improve study upload and anonymization time by up to fivefold.

Use case 2: Emergent Connect offers full EMR interoperability

Emergent Connect offers a vendor-neutral archive (VNA) solution with over 65 bi-directional connections with electronic medical record (EMR) systems for full interoperability. The solution comes equipped with a Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-cleared digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) viewer that focuses on delivering speed without latency. Emergent Connect also features a priority Modality Worklist that connects disparate PACS and locations, which are in turn integrated with FDA-cleared AI solutions.

Conclusion

As imaging informatics evolves to support interoperability and optimize resources, PACS solutions can reduce costs, support scalability, and provide secure, on-demand access wherever information is needed.

To find out more, explore healthcare solutions in AWS Marketplace. To learn more about these benefits and real-world customer successes at Rapid Radiology and Steel Valley Portable X-Ray Service, view the on-demand webinar.

About the author

James Han is the world-wide Business Development Manager for Healthcare Solutions at AWS. He is based in Seattle, WA. James started his entry into healthcare IT in 1999 by working with a research team on virtual colonoscopy software at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Over the years, he has been in various strategy and product development roles at Microsoft, Dell EMC, GE, 3M, and Veritas. These positions focused on analytics, Health Information Exchange, medical imaging, structured reporting, speech recognition, and general IT solutions for healthcare customers.