Building a ‘solid’ infrastructure for the exchange of medical data
Governance must be built in exchange of medical images in hospitals from the start.
That was what Monief Eid, a senior consultant for enterprise imaging and e-health for the Saudi Ministry of Health, emphasized in the HIMSS24 APAC session, “Enterprise Imaging and Image Exchange Challenges Around the World.” He identified governance, along with interoperability and infrastructure, as a major challenge in health information exchange.
“You’re dealing with multiple departments, multiple stakeholders, multiple workflows, multiple requirements, different ways of working.”
Having the right governance framework in place, Eid points out, helps an organization address compliance, change management, policies, processes and the type of skills needed to meet data sharing requirements.
When sharing medical images, interoperability standards are also critical. He demonstrated this point by comparing two ECG charts in a cardiology report. “(One) card fully supports DICOM and produces structure-interoperable data with no footprint. I can also view it as raw data and annotate and take measurements. Compared to the others I got ugly data – PDF only. I can’t do any analysis (with it), nor extract (data) from it.”
He also emphasized that providing a specific use case is crucial to gain patient consent for data sharing. “I have to give you my data and you have to give me my data… This is the exchange principle of pull and push.”
Eid demonstrated another case. In a CT-based clinical exam, he said, a doctor might have to go through 500 slides with a total of 3,000 images. “(The doctor) will need about 200 images to annotate and review to create his final report… that’s a lot of data.”
“(It could take) one to two years to build data from images (from that study).”
According to him, a ‘solid infrastructure’ is needed to exchange that kind of data.
“For successful corporate image sharing, you need to consider adoption (by) physicians – cardiologists, dermatologists, radiologists, dentists and patients through clear governance. (This will) ensure interoperable healthcare data is shared,” says Eid. said in closing.