Accelerating PACS on AWS with Visage Imaging

Visage 7 CloudPACS was initially launched in 2009, and since then, Visage has helped healthcare systems and imaging organizations replace their legacy PACS with local, regional, and national scale. “To move beyond legacy PACS that are decades old, healthcare organizations need future-proof solutions,” says Brad Levin, general manager at Visage, North America. “The PACS platform needs to be ultrafast, replete with clinical tools, and easily scalable.”

In a time when not many competitors were investing in the cloud, Visage pulled ahead of the crowd and worked with the AWS team to establish and optimize both customer-hosted and SaaS (software-as-a-service, Visage-hosted) deployment offerings. Over the past 3 years, early adopters have increasingly realized the benefits of Visage 7 CloudPACS delivered using a SaaS model. Managed services benefits include rapid implementation, resource optimization, and sustained security management. To tap into these benefits, Visage and AWS embarked on bringing Visage 7 CloudPACS to the cloud.

“What Visage on AWS delivers is a robust enterprise imaging platform that is proven, future proof, and powered by speed,” says Levin. “Together with Visage, AWS has an experienced organization of technology and imaging experts that help give our joint customers the confidence and assurance to embark and find success with Visage 7 CloudPACS.”

Working closely with the AWS team, Visage optimized the cloud-engineered Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging platform for the AWS cloud. “Visage 7 CloudPACS is built on three elements: the ultrafast speed of server-side rendering, which is even faster in the cloud; having a customer-focused, managed SaaS offering that provides customer support teams much-needed relief; and the utmost security, with effortless scale,” says Levin.

Visage 7 CloudPACS is primarily hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. Visage 7 CloudPACS archives older imaging files on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which offers object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. This service is configured for immutability with Visage 7 Open Archive and cannot be modified, providing a layer of protection for customers. As a result, Visage can provide customers with tools to maintain compliance, including with HIPAA.

Visage 7 CloudPACS has ultrafast streaming and provides subsecond image display. “Radiologists and imaging stakeholders have near immediate access to images, 2–3 times faster than with their prior systems,” says Levin. “Now, with a single viewer, all users have access to the entire imaging patient jacket instantaneously.” With these capabilities, imaging stakeholders have unfettered access to current and all prior imaging required for diagnostic interpretation.

“A renowned radiologist shared that with their slow, legacy PACS, they would finish their lengthy patient imaging exams very late in the day and would continue working on finalizing their imaging reports at home in the evening,” says Levin. “With Visage 7 CloudPACS, everything has accelerated. They’re now able to leave the clinic at 3 p.m., and instead of wrapping up reports at home, they can relax and stream their favorite TV shows.”

Because the Visage 7 CloudPACS platform is implemented on multiple cloud instances with a modern, future-proof architecture, it provides virtually zero downtime. Radiologists are also reporting 30–50 percent greater efficiency, 37 percent faster turnaround times, and greater precision in radiology readings using Visage’s sophisticated hanging protocols. This reliability and increased efficiency have facilitated a reduction in radiologist burnout and delivered better patient care.

Visage recently rolled out Visage 7 CloudPACS for Allina Health, replacing its legacy PACS and substantially reducing the time that it takes radiologists to display patient imaging. Allina Health chose Visage 7 on AWS and worked with Visage and AWS engineers to create a secure connection using AWS Direct Connect. With the new enterprise imaging platform, radiologists and physicians load studies 67 percent faster, improving the speed of diagnostic interpretation and providing immediate access to all patient imaging from the Allina Health electronic health record (EHR) system.

“Using Visage 7 on AWS, we’ve significantly improved the speed of our imaging,” says Brad Messerschmidt, Allina Health’s manager of RIS (radiology information system) and PACS applications. “Getting images quickly for our radiologists and physicians is key for us. That’s very beneficial for patient care.”