Hartford HealthCare is Connecticut’s most comprehensive healthcare network. Over the last several years, this community and academic health system has grown significantly through its strategic affiliations with hospitals and a variety of providers. 

University of California San Francisco Medical Center has a long history of setting the standards in breast imaging and breast cancer care. Now it’s also setting the standard when it comes to reading and managing digital breast images and facilitating workflow efficiency.

Delivering key images, reports and patient data to the point of diagnosis and care is the Holy Grail of radiology and many other specialties today. Having the correct information for the patient at the right time for the radiologist or referring physician starts with having the right viewer.

What tools and tactics are making breast imaging specialists and clinicians more efficient across the healthcare enterprise?

Eight years ago, Women’s Imaging Associates in Birmingham, Ala., was a small, well-respected mammography practice serving six OB/GYN offices in its area. Today, having embraced a 100% telemedicine model, its three fulltime breast specialists read images for 22 client facilities scattered around the U.S.—not only OB offices but also outpatient imaging centers and hospitals large and small. 

The imaging division at John Muir Health in California’s Contra Costa County has been supplying topnotch image-handling capabilities to end users located across the system’s sprawling family tree—three hospitals, seven outpatient imaging centers, a 1,000-plus physician network and a dozen or so sites providing outpatient, urgent-care and surgery services—since 2001. That’s when Sectra PACS entered the picture for the Walnut Creek-based organization.

There is no doubt that vendor neutral archives (VNAs) have gained favor over the last several years in managing medical images. But there is some debate over whether hospitals really need both a VNA and a PACS. If PACS can do double duty as VNA and PACS, why do you need both? As we see it, you don’t, as long as you have a true enterprise PACS and here’s why.

Nearly two decades ago, the PACS race was on in Southern California’s Inland Empire. The main event pitted the regional medical center, 439-bed Riverside County Regional Medical Center, against the larger 719-bed Loma Linda University Medical Center (LLUMC). In 1998, Riverside won the race by about six months, installing the first PACS in the region and, in the process, becoming the first hospital in the U.S. to select Sectra PACS.