Community Project Funding/Congressionally Directed Spending - Construction - Address: Charleston Area Medical Center Information Technology 400 Association Drive, Suite 200 | Charleston, WV 25311 Project Director Name: Amy Brenan, Manager | I/T Clinical and Ancillaries Phone: 304-388-1717 (office) 304-561-4841 (cell) Email Address: amy.brenan@camc.org Website Address: www.camc.org Charleston Area Medical Center is a nonprofit, 956-bed, regional referral center with nearly 8,000 employees and more than 700 physicians with admitting privileges. CAMC seeks $5,000,000 funding to replace its existing Radiology PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) with newer PACS and VNA (vendor neutral archive) storage technology that can better integrate with newer imaging modality technology and outpatient medical record so that CAMC can better fulfil this mission while serving patients in Southern West Virginia. CAMC implemented a version of our current PACS in 1998/1999 and have upgraded to and are currently utilizing the final version of the software. This software has limitations including that it is not designed for remote or mobile use, which are critical functionalities this day and age. Newer technology in medical imaging modalities such as Tomographic Mammography, CT (Computed Tomography), and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) generate extremely large image sets that require increasingly efficient technology to efficiently display and store. A new system will have tools with which to perform this functionality more efficiently. This PACS technology also allows for implementation of artificial intelligence within our systems. Our new storage platform (VNA) will have the capability of storing images from multiple disciplines outside of radiology. With this archive, a common viewing tool will be utilized for providers to view images from multiple disciplines regardless of what system was used to create the images. The images will be accessed from the patient EHR (Electronic Health Record). The eventual goal is to reduce silos of image storage throughout our technical imaging environment. Our VNA will be cloud-based, allowing for scalability as well as decreasing the amount of on-premises hardware, software, and space overhead required to maintain our medical images. We also seek to implement capabilities to share images with outside facilities, providers, telemedicine sites, and patients to better support the continuum of care. Our Image Sharing platform will allow access of medical images outside our facility in a secure and controlled manner. Currently we often rely on exchange of physical media (CD and DVD) to transport and import medical images from outside facilities as well as sending images to patients, providers, and other facilities. We also have multiple VPNs (Virtual Private Network) and 3 different imaging sharing platforms for which we are a ‘spoke’. We are not able to electronically share images with patients, providers, or facilities with which we do not share a VPN or are not a ‘hub’ to our ‘spoke’ platforms. Our new platform will allow us to be a ‘hub’ in this space and give us the ability to share images more easily and securely. This is extremely important to our Telemedicine program as well as our Patient Transfer Center. Before receiving a patient from an outside facility, providers can review images and begin care decisions before the patient arrives. Or the transfer can be avoided, if viewing images can assist in the determination that acute care is not needed, and the patient cared for closer to home. There are any excellent patient care use cases for an image sharing platform, another being potential decrease in radiation dose by avoiding duplicative radiological studies.
