With its potential to facilitate and expedite clinical diagnosis and increase the accuracy of many medical procedures, point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is being increasingly adopted throughout hospitals and the wider healthcare system.
POCUS provides patients the opportunity to see their images with their clinicians, helping them to understand their diagnosis, which can lead to greater engagement and compliance. From a healthcare provider’s perspective, the technology offers a way to reduce costs, avoid the need to move a patient across the facility and bring a more collaborative approach to patient care.
However, to truly fulfil its potential, the POCUS solution must offer not only medical functionality and accuracy but also fit seamlessly into the healthcare provider’s wider Imaging IT systems or Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS). It is only then that healthcare professionals can acquire the complete and accurate medical imaging record they need to ensure quality of outcome and care for each patient.
Healthcare professionals can improve their ultrasound skills by taking POCUS certification from Zedu Ultrasound Training Academy or other reputable training centers.
POCUS certification courses provide comprehensive training in various ultrasound applications, including abdominal, vascular, musculoskeletal, cardiac, and obstetric/gynecologic. These programs enhance your knowledge of ultrasound principles, techniques, and interpretation skills, granting you credentials for higher levels of work while providing the latest insights in the field.
Overcoming metadata issues
Unfortunately, not all POCUS technology can do what’s described above. Some, for example, don’t possess the worklist features that are typically common to larger departments, for example, radiology. This means that images captured on POCUS devices cannot be easily or automatically incorporated into core enterprise systems, such as the electronic medical record (EMR) or PACS. While PACSs, for instance, may be good at managing the flow of DICOM images within departments, it’s much less effective when it comes to assimilating non-DICOM assets.
Any attempt to migrate data manually between systems is time-consuming and likely to lead to errors in transcription, with the consequent inclusion of ‘rough data’ into a patient’s records.
However, this kind of functionality gap can be removed if the POCUS platform has the capability to automatically resolve issues relating to incomplete or incorrect metadata, for example involving order or accession numbers, then index and forward the revised studies to the appropriate destination. Automating the indexing of POCUS images, which often lack a formal radiology order, allows them to be indexed to the patient record in the EMR.
Avoiding clinical blind spots
Having the capacity to do this is a much better solution than being forced to create multiple PACS or siloed imaging systems for different specialities, which fails to address the longer-term issue of greater accessibility and interoperability.
When separate imaging systems develop across an organisation, this inevitably leads to the ‘siloing’ of data and disparate image archives, which then limits access to these clinically relevant images and may lead to information being omitted from the bigger diagnostic or clinical picture. It’s not unusual, for instance, for organisations to find that important clinical imaging material is scattered across any number of locations, applications and solutions. These comprise of a myriad of PACS, CDs, non-networked hard drives and other removable storage.
This is a particular problem in proprietary, vendor-controlled environments, which is why it is important to seek out a vendor-neutral platform that allows you to integrate POCUS content with enterprise systems.
To avoid the creation of potential clinical blind spots Hyland’s POCUS solution uses industry-standard protocols, API’s and formats, to ensure that POCUS studies can be captured and managed across an enterprise, alongside images from DICOM modalities, e.g. Radiology, Cardiology as well as visible light image and videos from specialities such as, gastroenterology, dermatology, wound care, and all other departments.
Recognising the viewer preferences of different departments, such as radiology and cardiology, ensures there is no disruption to a healthcare organisation’s existing approach to referential or interpretive viewing. So once POCUS studies are stored in Hyland’s Acuo VNA, they can be made available enterprise-wide through the web-based NilRead enterprise, diagnostic viewer, allowing images from any modality to be accessed and referenced by clinicians on any personal computer or mobile device.
This allows clinicians to retain autonomy over access to an image and its manipulation and sharing, while contributing to cross-disciplinary, patient-centred care.
Scale and flexibility
The use of point-of-care imaging is only going to increase as technology evolves and clinicians become more confident using it. As it is, POCUS images already make up a significant portion of clinically relevant data that needs to be incorporated into wider systems.
So, it’s critical that healthcare organisations recognise the importance of having a common enterprise-wide imaging framework that can be easily expanded and reshaped to changing needs. That requires a degree of interoperability that can’t be achieved without an open, standards based, vendor neutral archive system.
As we’ve seen, there’s an opportunity to do this if a solution is chosen with collaboration among key stakeholders in mind. That way POCUS can make a significant contribution to the enterprise-wide imaging picture that aims to improve patient outcomes, which after all is the whole point of caring.
Article by Saduf Ali-Drakesmith is director, Global Strategy, Enterprise Imaging at Hyland. www.hyland.com
