Overview of this use-case
Targeted at external providers and primary care, use exoPACS as a ‘mini-PACS’, giving image access to primary care clinicians and other healthcare-workers in outreach clinics and GP locations.
This offers fine-grained access to imaging, with a firewall-like segregation from acute PACS providing peace of mind for data protection and Caldicott-recommended controls.
What are the key benefits of this use-case?
- Improve Image Availability – images are available on-demand by the remote clinician/user, without the need for individual image transfer requests and associated admin delays.
- Controlled Inter-Organisation Image Access – controlled communication between acute PACS (if any) and exoPACS, ensures that organisations only have access to data for patients under their care. This is particularly important with increases in shared care and consortium arrangements
- Controlled Local Image Access – within the organisation, access controls ensure that individual users can only see studies that they are meant to see.
What are the main features relevant to this use-case?
- A lightweight IHE XDS-I viewer, that works in any web browser
- A vendor neutral fully DICOM conformant archive
- Industry-standard, low-cost storage
- Per-study access rules, enabling fine-grained control of access to imaging
Improve Image Availability
Images are available to all clinicians, immediately. Because exoPACS is off-PACS, there is no need to link exams with RIS, so these exams can be clinical trial, physics tests or other imaging as well as secondary care imaging made available to GPs, primary care clinicians and other out-reach clinic locations.
Future-proofing, Ownership and Control of Data
Cypher IT provide the software, installation and on-going support services for exoPACS; the Trust provides the hardware, including disk storage and associated redundancy or fail-over. By separating software supply from hardware supply, Trusts are able to procure disk space strategically across multiple services (eg shared on a SAN or NAS), and in particular, much more cost-effectively. This enables us to offer a value proposition far exceeding that of traditional PACS vendors’ storage proposals.
exoPACS is an XDS-I archive (the conformance statement is in exoPACS Technical Details). This means that an IHE XDS-I compliant viewer from any vendor can be used to view studies on exoPACS. The XDS-I configuration, like the configuration of DICOM nodes, is open for your administrators to use; we do not password protect or otherwise restrict customer access to these areas. Thus we do not restrict access to or control of your own data. Furthermore, because access mechanisms are based on IHE standards, the mechanism to access the data is future-proofed.
The reason we don’t restrict access is because Cypher IT’s approach is to earn income by providing software and services that solves problems and adds value; we are a healthcare software company rather than a service or man-days company. Because of this we empower our customers to administer their own system and their own data.
Finally, because the hardware and disk storage is provided by the Trust, then as well as being better value for you to procure, it also allows you to integrate exoPACS easily into your IT strategy. exoPACS can be delivered as a virtual server, and storage can be on a SAN or NAS that is shared with other hospital systems. It can therefore be backed up, replicated, and made available for failover in the same way as other systems’ data, simplifying your IT design, administration and business continuity planning.
Benefits
- cost savings realised through the use of virtualisation and distributed storage
- integrated backup, replication and business continuity
- simplified IT administration