lifeIMAGE Marks Five Years; One Billion Images Exchanged
NEWTON, Mass. (PRWEB) April 14, 2014 -- In April 2009, lifeIMAGE embarked on a mission to eliminate duplication of medical imaging exams to avoid $30 billion in annual costs, excessive and harmful radiation, and to promote faster, safer, higher quality care for patients everywhere. To fulfill this mission, lifeIMAGE builds and operates a network of cloud and Internet-based software that helps medical images from any source become part of patients’ records and provides physicians access to patients’ imaging histories conveniently, from any setting.
Five years later, lifeIMAGE is celebrating the growth of its network which has expanded to connect 533 hospitals, and has been accessed by nearly 54,000 unique users.
-The lifeIMAGE network is anchored by the largest health systems in the United States, whose combined statistics represent a significant portion of the overall health care delivered in the country annually.
--78.15 million outpatient visits (~ 6.51% of total),
--10.3 million visits to emergency rooms (~ 8.65% of total),
--46.29 million radiological exams (~ 7.12% of total)
--115,000 full time physicians (~ 15.33% of total)
-To date, the lifeIMAGE network has been used to exchange more than 1.1 billion images throughout all 50 states, and international referral sources have utilized the network from more than 90 countries. Its 54,000 user base represents nearly 16,000 active users who log into their secure and HIPAA compliant image sharing accounts regularly.
-Some of the health systems to join the lifeIMAGE network recently include:
Kaiser Permanente; UCSF Medical Center; NYU Medical Center; Texas Children’s Hospital; University of WI Hospital & Clinics; Children’s Medical Center Dallas; MD Anderson Cancer Center; University of Michigan Hospital; Fox Chase Cancer Center; Northwestern Memorial Hospital; UMASS Memorial Health Care; Temple University Hospitals; BJC Healthcare; Medical University of SC (MUSC); University of TN Medical Center; Baylor Health Care System; University of Kentucky Health; INTEGRIS Health
"The ability of cloud-based services to replace portable storage devices has revolutionized the way we access images. With lifeIMAGE we can now instantly import outside studies, which in turn helps us provide more thoughtful and efficient care,” said George Bisset, MD, Chief and Edward B. Singleton Endowed Chair of Pediatric Radiology at Texas Children’s Hospital and Professor of Radiology at Baylor College of Medicine.
"As a major Level I trauma center we are looking forward to our implementation of lifeIMAGE so that our ED physicians can view the images of patients being transferred before the patient arrives. This will help our ED better anticipate the immediate needs of these patients and reduce the need for performing repeat imaging," said Dr. Max Rosen, Chairman of Radiology at UMass Memorial Medical Center.
-KLAS named lifeIMAGE the “Category Leader” for Image Exchange in the “2013 Best in KLAS Awards: Software & Services,” the first report to assess image sharing vendors*. This KLAS ranking and “Category Leader” designation are based exclusively on customer feedback in the areas of sales and contracting, implementation and training, functionality and upgrades, and general performance. lifeIMAGE was the only image exchange vendor evaluated to achieve the highest level of “KLAS Konfidence” in its score, indicating more than thirty unique healthcare organizations provided feedback on their use of its products.
-lifeIMAGE has worked in partnership with Radiological Society of North America on the RSNA Image Share, since its inception in 2011. This pilot project, funded by the National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and administered by RSNA, is a network created to enable providers to share medical images with patients using personal health record accounts. These free cloud accounts are used by patients, who are cared for at participating medical centers across the country. lifeIMAGE recently joined Carequality, a new initiative from Healtheway that aims to facilitate interoperability between existing and emerging health information exchange networks. As announced in a February 2014 release, lifeIMAGE has begun early work on image exchange with Epic, a Healtheway and Carequality founding member, to develop integration of their respective systems. As one example of the many use cases available through interoperability of lifeIMAGE and MyChart, Epic’s patient portal, patients could share prior imaging exams with their care providers’ EHR. lifeIMAGE plans to integrate this future capability with the RSNA image sharing network.
-Utilization of image sharing capabilities have increasingly showed new areas of return on investment. This is measurable in areas such as cost avoidance, new revenues from increased specialty referrals or secondary reads by radiologists, added efficiencies leading to extra time for providers to see more patients, avoiding errors that lead to complications, managing the golden hour in stroke cases, avoiding vital delays in trauma settings, and distributing results to avoid duplication outside of a providers’ base network. The following is a sample list of health systems who have been using the network for some, many, or all above use cases:
Partners Healthcare; Geisinger Health System; Stanford Hospital and Clinics; Boston Children’s Hospital; Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; UCLA Health System; NewYork Presbyterian Hospital; Memorial Sloan-Kettering; Montefiore Medical Center; Mount Sinai Medical Center; Moffitt Cancer Center; University of MD Medical System; Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center; Ohio State University Med Center; University of Pennsylvania Health; Yale-New Haven Health System; Henry Ford Hospital; University of Washington Medical Center; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Stony Brook University Medical Center; University of Rochester Medical Center; Baystate Health System; Fletcher Allen Health Care; Boston Medical Center; Georgetown University Hospital; Froedtert Hospital; Loyola University Medical Center; Lahey Clinic; Cook Children’s; Children’s National Medical Center
“We are very proud of the accomplishments we have achieved in a relatively short period of time, and incredibly grateful for the opportunity to make a difference in the way our customers care for patients,” said Hamid Tabatabaie, founder and CEO of lifeIMAGE. “However, we’ll continue to behave as if our work has just begun. Our large network of providers has afforded us a unique opportunity, and we see it as our responsibility, to bring about an extensive record locator service, based on popular HIT standards, where our customers can form trusted relationships and further enhance access to patients’ imaging records.”
About lifeIMAGE
lifeIMAGE provides a broad set of solutions for universal e-sharing of diagnostic imaging information. These products securely connect hospitals, radiology groups and physicians to their patients everywhere and are currently deployed at many of the nation’s leading healthcare institutions and academic medical centers. The goal of the lifeIMAGE, recently named the top image exchange vendor by KLAS Research*, is to help avoid duplicate exams and eliminate unnecessary patient exposure to excessive radiation.
- “2013 Best in KLAS Awards: Software & Services,” January 2014. © 2014 KLAS Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved. http://www.klasresearch.com
Jackie Leckas, lifeIMAGE, http://www.lifeimage.com, +1 (617) 990-2262, [email protected]
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