BLOG: A Patient First Approach to Improving Imaging Accessibility and Usability

TheCOVID-19pandemic accelerated a change that was already occurring in imaging-heavy practices across the country — the shift to a cloud-based system with a light footprint and easy accessibility for remote diagnostic viewing. The cloud environment provides easy access to data from anywhere, but it’s the tools within the cloud viewing suite thatBrian Gay, M.D., owner ofFirst Look MRIin Atlanta and cloud technology early-adopter, finds most helpful in his practice.

First Look MRI places emphasis on patient communication as a differentiator, and Gay relies onAmbra Health’s newly launchedProViewerto prepare reports that are easy for patients to understand. He often uses ProViewer’s tooling feature to embed an image within a scan to share with a patient as these images can also be easily annotated within the viewer.

“当病人拿到书面报告时，这对他们来说可能意义不大;但他们会看到那些照片，然后说，‘哦，我的半月板撕裂了。这里有一个大箭头。’所以我喜欢这种能力，”盖伊说。

Ambra Health’s ProViewer is a cloud-based diagnostic image viewer that expands on the capabilities of their existing viewer with advanced capabilities. The ProViewer allows for mobile access for quick reads, and full diagnostic teleradiology capabilities from any device with a major web browser. The ProViewer also has advanced tool sets including multi-planar reconstruction, surface and volume rendering and anatomical reordering.

When asked, why Ambra, Gay notes, “A big selling point about the Ambra ProViewer is the ease of changing the tools. Ambra makes it really easy for the user to add a tool or subtract a tool, just intuitively. You just click on the tool to make it disappear, or add a tool. To configure the tools easily is a huge plus.”

As thepandemicforced radiology practices to dramatically shift theirworkflows为了满足临床医生和患者的需求，放射学界的其他成员很快发现了早期采用者已经知道的事情:一种易于访问的远程解决方案，能够实现协作，将提供大量的好处，远远超过当前的大流行危机。

“We found a number of institutions hurrying up their process of deploying cloud,” saidMorris Panner他是Ambra Health的首席执行官，该公司在2020年春季看到了客户对云技术的极大兴趣。“突然之间，我们发现自己在慌乱。人们在购买厕纸时遇到了麻烦，我们在各种环境中提供足够快的服务器时也遇到了麻烦，因为使用量的变化太快了。突然之间，拥有这种能力，并在此基础上进行扩展，是至关重要的。”

Cloud access and collaboration tools also mean that physicians can easily ask colleagues for second opinions from specialists around the world. Users can invite anyone to log in to view an image.

“They don't have to worry about getting a complex system of their own or whether their image will work on their system or whether it has a bug or virus. They can simply open their browser-based device and give me a view,” Panner said. “And we are seeing an explosion in care being elevated because now you can access the best opinions in the world. And what we love about that is we think that's what everybody should have.”

基于云的技术和协作工具不仅为医生和实践提供了更好的协调，而且还改善了与患者的沟通和互动。

“Out of the pandemic, I think we saw tremendous stress on the system, for those seeing care for other conditions, who were really being boxed out of the system,” Panner said. “We have seen a virtualization and a rethinking of how infrastructure should be deployed. And that means being able to reach the patient virtually. That’s probably been one of the largest outcomes of this, which in many ways is tremendously positive.”

Editor’s Note:This is the third blog in a series about sharing patient images. The firstBLOG: Why Image Transfer Needs To Be Electronic, can be foundhere. The secondBLOG: How Artificial Intelligence Can Help In Image Transmission of Images, can be foundhere.

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