8 DECEMBER - 2022IN MY OPINIONIN MY OPINIONIN MY OPINIONThe only constant is change. 2020 showed us that radiology, much like the rest of the world, is in a state of flux as COVD-19 accelerated the need to support remote and distributed reading workflows. The radiology landscape is changing, and although we throw around the term "back to normal", the reality is that a new era was already imminent anyway. We're now looking at challenges that healthcare professionals--specifically healthcare IT teams and radiologists--have never had to face before, and they aren't going away anytime soon. And not just challenges, but new opportunities to support remote work and empower clinicians are raising questions about how our systems and processes can evolve. So what walls are we facing when it comes to imaging in healthcare, and how will we scale them or remove them Radiology Without Walls: Overcoming PACS Challenges to Brighten the Future of HealthcareBy Timothy Rose, Vice President, Product Management, Radiology, GE Healthcarealtogether in order to provide the needed flexibility in the future?More data and higher riskThe better the technology in our imaging gets, the more data it requires. This has been a growing trend over time, and now has reached somewhat of a breaking point. On average, hospitals now produce and store 50 petabytes of data per year. That's 50 million gigabytes. That can hamstring proper communication simply because of file size. If anyone has ever tried to send an email with a large attachment, large amounts of data aren't easy to send or share.The current PACS systems also require a great deal of IT support, from software upgrades to security monitoring. This not only involves precious time from IT teams, but also large capital investments and specified skillsets to manage the day-to-day requirements. And, if the systems aren't all connected, the software and hardware updates need to be done multiple times, almost constantly.In addition to the data complexity, the imaging processes themselves are more detailed. With more details come more variance in the results, no matter how skilled the clinician. Radiologists are already stretched thin, and with each new variable, it becomes more difficult to be consistent.Expanding out to the healthcare system itself, imaging has come under scrutiny in the past because of the risk of a cyberattack. In fact, according to the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT), 81 percent Timothy Rose
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