AdventHealth relies on PowerShare to improve patient outcomes
Digital image sharing eliminates physical media while creating pathways for improved treatment planning.
Accelerating patient care
Learn how AdventHealth improves treatment planning and delivery because of PowerShare’s immediate connection to other sites in the network.
Challenge
- Support better patient care and treatment experience with real‑time diagnostic image sharing.
- Alleviate labor and effort involved in producing and processing hard media (CDs).
Solution
- Nuance PowerShare Image Sharing
Results
- Dismantled silos of information to create optimal patient experiences.
- Reduced delays in image sharing when patients transfer between care sites.
- Eliminated the need to create physical CDs, alleviating the burden on the radiology team.
Background
At AdventHealth, the mission is clear; healing and restoring patients’ bodies, minds, and spirits. With 80,000 employees across 130 locations, AdventHealth provides everyday wellness and preventive healthcare, innovative medical treatments, and life‑saving diagnostic services.
Creating efficiencies for diagnostic imaging workflows
Henry Miller oversees Enterprise Imaging for AdventHealth’s north and west divisions, including seven hospitals, a wide range of imaging centers, and several clinics. “I blend my IT background with a healthcare provider mindset. A key component to everything we do is to keep things simple for our people while building on efficiencies along the way,” he says.
Among those efforts has been the implementation of Nuance PowerShare, a cloud‑based network that connects healthcare facilities, providers, and patients for quick, secure sharing of medical imaging and diagnostic reports. It’s a solution that Miller says has completely changed his day‑to‑day job. “As a PACS administrator, everything is tied to CDs. It’s an all‑day thing—burning CDs, hearing they don’t work, re‑burning them because they got lost in the mail. They’re the bane of our existence, and we are glad to eliminate them.”
Pathways for improved treatment planning and delivery
The struggles of physical media aside, AdventHealth recognized that electronic image exchange would significantly accelerate patient care. Miller explained how commonplace CD‑related delays were for patient transfer scenarios. “It’s amazing that our ability to deliver care would depend on this legacy technology. By the time you’d get the CD burned and delivered, you may have lost hours or even days of treatment planning. That can mean a lot when you’re talking about a patient who’s battling cancer.”
Too often, the AdventHealth team would need to re‑create and re‑send CDs, or the receiving facility would have to repeat the imaging exam. “PowerShare eliminates those delays and the need to re‑radiate patients,” he says. PowerShare has also reduced the time radiologists wait for comparison studies, as in the case of mammography where studies are not read without priors. Miller notes, “We would have to wait up to ten days to read them. But now, we have them when the patient arrives for their exam.”
Expanding the network creates more value for providers
According to Miller, digital image sharing even just a few years ago was far more complicated. “It seemed that everyone had different cloud vendors, and there was disagreement about which solution to use. But AdventHealth is a large system; with 10 million studies shared a year, we want to streamline processes, not complicate them. Once we standardized on PowerShare, we immediately began connecting to other sites. It’s so easy.”
Also, a part of their network is AdventHealth’s outside vendors, such as those creating bicuspid valves, knee replacements, and stents. “Now, with immediate access to imaging, they can accelerate the planning and development of the patient’s hardware.”
Minimizing IT burden with a reliable, easy‑to‑use platform
In addition to building their diverse network of referring organizations and clinics, PowerShare has simplified image exchange between AdventHealth and its newly formed long‑term health partners, one for orthopedics and one for cancer treatment. Miller says, “In years past, it would have been months of work to get interfaces set up for image sharing. But with PowerShare, the process is automated. We have had months of planning calls to establish the partnership, but the image exchange component took 30 minutes,” a fact that is reducing the burden on AdventHealth’s IT teams and infrastructure.
Looking ahead, AdventHealth continues to look for ways to further leverage PowerShare; for example, radiation oncology treatment planning is on the roadmap. The team explores how the solution can better support a cancer patient’s treatment planning and delivery while also speeding up the care team’s workflow. Miller says that PowerShare helps AdventHealth create better patient outcomes while streamlining the radiology team’s workflow. “And the support is phenomenal, consistent, and timely. The solution is first‑rate. It’s extremely reliable, easy to configure, and, most importantly, easy to use,” he concludes.