Immediate Access to Medical Images Saves Lives at Tampa General

Alexander Nieto-Avila, Imaging Systems Support Manager, Tampa General Hospital, and Lara Caldwell Stout, Director, Diagnostics, Nuance Communications. At Tampa General Hospital (TGH), the region’s only Level I trauma center, radiologists and physicians treating the area’s most critically ill patients are routinely faced with life or death decisions. For them, speed and information can literally make the difference. One area of care ripe for improvement was the speed at which specialists accessed patient medical images, particularly important for trauma patients transferring to TGH from area hospitals. While physicians working across TGH share images via a common PACS environment, the referring facilities did not store medical images in a format compatible within TGH’s platform. This untimely access to images was delaying lifesaving medical care, forcing patients to be rescanned, and affecting outcomes. In 2014, TGH made the strategic move to store medical images on a cloud-sharing network. This teleconference explores TGH’s rationale and plan for adopting cloud-based image sharing, and presents the benefits experienced by trauma patients and caregivers due to an immediate and reliable workflow for image sharing.