Optimizing Enterprise Imaging in the Cloud Using Visage 7 PACS Platform on AWS with Allina Health

Based in Minneapolis, Allina Health is a not-for-profit healthcare system that owns or operates 12 hospitals and more than 90 clinics throughout Minnesota and western Wisconsin. Its radiologists use PACS technology to read more than one million new imaging studies a year in specialties such as orthopedics, mammography, cardiology, and nuclear medicine.

For 19 years, Allina Health had been using the same PACS solution, which relied on aging infrastructure that featured dozens of siloed servers acting as hubs that transmitted data to designated spoke sites. The legacy PACS model, originally part of a 5-year digital transformation plan, resulted in slow load times that frustrated radiologists trying to optimize patient care. “Our prior PACS was approaching end of life,” says Brad Messerschmidt, Allina Health’s manager of radiology information system (RIS) and PACS applications. “It was time to move on to an enterprise model so that everything was available everywhere at any given time.”

Allina Health had narrowed its decision to two PACS providers: Visage and an on-premises solution from another vendor. “Initially, we were looking primarily at functionality,” says Messerschmidt. “Cloud was not one of the top five things we had to have, but the cloud solution was light-speed faster. And we didn’t want to build out substantial infrastructure. So those were deciding factors for Visage.”

In November 2022, Allina Health went live with Visage 7 across the enterprise. “It was out of the box, basically,” says Messerschmidt. “The speed with which we could implement because of Visage 7 on AWS was unbelievably fast. Even my team was questioning how it was possible that we could go so fast.”

Allina Health required a secure connection that encrypted all data passing between its on-premises infrastructure and Visage 7 on AWS. Also, all traffic had to pass through its preexisting security architecture from Palo Alto Networks, an AWS Partner that helps customers accelerate cloud migration initiatives with inline and API-based security offerings that complement native AWS security features. Together, engineers from Allina Health, Visage, and AWS built a secure, dedicated network connection using AWS Direct Connect, a cloud service that is the shortest path to AWS resources. “AWS stepped up and gave us really good resources to use, and Visage really knew its stuff,” says Jarrod Swetland, senior network engineer at Allina Health. “We had a working environment in under 3 weeks coming from zero AWS experience or connectivity.”

Allina Health no longer deals with updates to its operating systems, firmware, or applications, which sometimes took months. “Using Visage 7 as a software-as-a-service deployment on AWS, we don’t have that anymore,” says Messerschmidt. “In a hospital environment, uptime is key for us.”

Using Visage 7, radiologists display images in about 1 second on average, approximately 67 percent faster than the legacy PACS solution. This saves significant time over the course of a doctor’s day. Some patients know their results before they leave the clinic. Even prior studies load instantaneously, providing access to the entire imaging patient jacket, which means that radiologists don’t have to skip over patients in the queue because images from previous exams aren’t available. Visage also provides an intelligent way to schedule and prestage prior imaging studies from Allina Health’s third-party vendor-neutral archive so that all patient imaging is available days before the patient arrives to be scanned for their new image. “We used to get complaints on a daily basis about slow routing, that radiologists were waiting for large datasets to download to our legacy PACS,” says Messerschmidt. “Using Visage 7, our complaint calls have drastically decreased. This has completely changed the interactions for the radiologists. I can’t believe that we didn’t do this earlier.”

Allina Health also seamlessly integrated Visage 7 into its existing clinical applications, such as its Epic electronic medical records, its reporting software, and a new orthopedics application. Radiologists at Allina Health’s flagship hospital and those working remotely off-site can quickly and precisely read and interpret multimodality diagnostic imaging from a patient seen at any Allina Health location.