Teleradiology Trends For 2020
More than ever, radiology and teleradiology need the same IT platforms
To set the context for the webinar and take-aways, we began by reviewing some of the numbers. The global teleradiology market is forecasted to reach $11.5 Billion. There will be 75 million Americans over age 65 by 2030. With aging, the population is projected to experience more chronic disease, and therefore, need more imaging and extended health data in the next decade. The sheer volume of imaging data acquired, stored, and transferred presents challenges as well as incredible opportunities.
Consolidation Across Radiology Group
Smaller radiology groups are being acquired and/or are merging with others. Until recently, consolidation in radiology has been limited, when compared to other specialties such as emergency medicine, anesthesia, and dermatology. Private equity firms, private equity-backed group practices, and publicly traded multi-specialty groups have recently turned their attention to radiology. Dr. Agrawal shared a key reason for this teleradiology trend: economies of scale. The complexity of medicine is ever-expanding. The difficulty in the regulatory and legal environments is also ever-expanding. To that end, economies of scale can be very valuable for radiology practices. Insurance reimbursement and MIPS/MACRA is another reason behind the consolidation trend. As groups get larger and larger, they can command reimbursement from insurance companies. With larger team backing radiology groups, they are able to leverage technology and artificial intelligence on a greater scale.
Teleradiology Allows Greater Collaboration
Throughput Improvements: Delivering Studies at 10X
Another strategy that allows radiology groups to shorten turnaround time is by pre-fetching relevant priors. Prefetch from Dicom Systems enables radiologists to have both current studies and relevant priors routed to their workstations at the same time. Once a new order is assigned to a radiologist, that doctor’s ‘Priors’ preferences’ are used to create a Query/Retrieve message. Prefetch also features the ability to combine persons from multiple facilities under one Enterprise Patient ID. Physicians are able to see all prior image sets/reports, regardless of how the number of sites at which the patient has been imaged. Utilizing DICOM 3.0 standard TLS encryption & DCMSYS’ router compression algorithms significantly improves delivery time.
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