Specialties Get an AI Boost
Bill Lacy, senior vice president for medical informatics global business at Fujifilm Healthcare Americas, discussed the impact of AI in medical imaging workflows.
Q: Where are you seeing measurable improvements in workflow efficiency today?
LACY: We see AI as a tool that will allow radiologists to be faster, more efficient and ultimately improve the quality of care. It’s going to allow for precision medicine because it’s going to steer them toward what’s most important related to patient care. AI will also take away a lot of the mundane things that radiologists deal with. It can allow the radiologists to spend most of their time on the most important cases, the most important disease-specific areas.
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Q: For smaller hospitals or health systems, implementing advanced enterprise imaging platforms can be expensive and complex. What are the biggest barriers to adoption? Is it cost? IT infrastructure? Training? Or something else?
LACY: One of the big changes that is allowing for smaller health systems to adopt enterprise imaging and AI is cloud. Whether you’re a smaller organization or a larger one, managing your own data centers, and the hardware and the network involved in that, is becoming very costly. Cloud has really opened the door for smaller organizations to more effectively deploy technology for enterprise imaging. The other thing that we focused on is converging our technology.
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Q: What operational challenges do hospitals encounter when trying to centralize imaging data, and how realistic is the promise of a truly unified imaging workflow?
LACY: Enterprise imaging is something that’s been worked on now for over a decade. Most health systems are still at a point where they’re centralizing radiology and cardiology. There’s a challenge still today in converting those legacy workflows to get that imaging centralized. There are tools that we have developed in the vendor-neutral archive to really allow, outside of radiology and cardiology, for connectivity to departments that are using digital cameras or otherwise capturing and storing images.
(Sara Osberger, executive director of marketing for enterprise imaging at Fujifilm Healthcare Americas Corporation, added that the right experienced partner can help healthcare organizations improve standardizations around imaging and work closely to engage clinicians so that imaging solutions add value to their workflows.)
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