Unleash the Power of the Cloud for Enterprise Imaging

Cloud solutions have been proven to provide security, remote access, uptime, storage and less capital investment. Cybersecurity issues have become a key disruption for the healthcare industry in recent years.

A staggering 50.4 million1 patient records were breached last year, and 70%2 of institutions reported a serious security incident. Not to mention the costly nature of these breaches, with the average cost per incident at $9.23 million3 info.changehealthcare.com/enterprise-imaging

Worst of all, breaches can disrupt critical patient services. That’s where the power of the cloud comes in. You can protect yourself from these harms with a secure cloud solution specifically designed to keep systems safe — and, just as important, to keep them from being used for an attack that could compromise your entire enterprise.

Transitioning your operations to the cloud is also a cost-effective solution that allows you to future-proof your investment as you scale. The cloud’s total cost of ownership can save an organization up to 20%. Maintaining on-prem platforms creates a high demand for utilizing IT resources and costs. With the cloud, enjoy the ability to redeploy IT resources to other priorities because of the multilayered security protection, aligned with HITRUST and SOC2 certification requirements.

With the cloud, you won’t be slowed down. Get reliability with the same or better performance than your current on-prem solution gives you.

Leverage the elasticity of the cloud to transform patient care with secure access to shareable imaging data with Change Healthcare Stratus Imaging. Work with us to plan your strategy to help improve clinical and operational efficiencies at every step along the way.

Get in touch to see how we’re transforming the healthcare system.

Into the clouds

In 2018, the system had little presence in the cloud; Elley’s ambition since undertaking his role has been to expand this dramatically. “I would venture to say that only 1% to 2% of our environment was cloud-based. As we go into 2023, about a third of it will be, says Elley.

“Our early move was from on-premise collaboration software into GCP. An 18-month, ongoing project is moving our ERP environments into the cloud. Any new systems, replacements or updates are evaluated for a move to the cloud. We're on all the main cloud platforms now, as we deploy any new tech, the first thought is about its appropriateness in the cloud.

“A priority is value for money. Does it make sense financially, from a support and reliability of performance perspective, to move that to a cloud? We're successfully reducing the amount of on-prem, server and storage needs.

“Recently, we've been upgrading our Picture Archive Communications System (PACS) system for both cardiology and radiology with the help of our partner, Change Healthcare. And now we're moving our long-term image archive and backup – in a consistent year-on-year increase for cloud utilisation.”

Maintaining on-premise platforms is expensive and involves a lot of manual work. It's hard to predict and plan spending. And then there's the matter of hardware, storage, servers, and licensing. Baptist Health is therefore benefitting – not just in efficiency now, but in future costs. Another benefit has been the greater predictability of readmissions, sepsis and many other problems formerly dealt with reactively.

Many more financial and cash-flow improvements are in the plan: “I’m keen to bring in AI to help the revenue cycle –for example, pre-authorisations – and I'm excited about its potential on the clinical side, too. Change Healthcare is helping us greatly to identify and implement these technologies.”

Particularly valuable today are advances in medical imaging technology. If a patient comes in for a CAT scan, we bank up huge numbers of images captured to illuminate a specific issue, but these may cast light on unrelated problems that should also be dealt with. ML can pick these up and bring them to the attention of the Radiologists. This is the kind of thing that really fires up Michael Elley. There’s no limit to where this technology can take patient care. As it improves, it can – while documenting an individual patient – identify similarities with other patients' scans, relate the data to other clinical indicators and indicate potential problems for other patients at an early stage.

Taking healthcare to a higher level

“I think this technology will take medicine and healthcare to the next level,” says Elley. “It will augment, not replace, what we are doing at present, making it safer and better all the time. For example, a patient may be receiving a full chest scan for a musculo-skeletal problem causing pain or limiting their mobility. All their attention, plus that of the physician, is naturally focused on that particular problem.

“The potential of leveraging new technologies that augment the work of our clinicians to enhance, extend, and ultimately save lives make my job truly exciting!”

It should be said, however, that Baptist Health remains a fundamentally grounded organisation, and this suits Michael Elley's style of leadership. He believes that no matter how exciting the potential of advanced clinical technologies may be, they can't be introduced successfully across any large healthcare system without buy-in from all stakeholders, and in particular, among the people leading change throughout the organisation.

“One of the first things I arranged upon my arrival was to establish specific IT leaders within the operational leadership teams of our hospitals and physician groups. These are not only relaying information to those operational areas about what's going on from an IT perspective, but that information is coming back to us about directional and strategic changes currently occurring or planned to occur on the operational side. As a result, I can say confidently that we now have a really solid alignment between those operational areas and IT.

“Much of the evolution and change in the organisation is now necessarily going to be IT-driven, whether it's a simple question of hardware support software or something as broad as the revolution in imaging capabilities.

“At every level, it’s important that we have that alignment with the operational side, that we have a presence in all the hospital operations and strategy conversations. Indeed, everything from the different service lines to our clinical space. I think we’ve done a nice job of getting our senior leadership aligned!”

Looks like it’s onwards and upwards for Baptist Health of Arkansas from here on out.