Tuesday, January 19, 2010

What will an Image Warehouse do for me?

Sorry for the long delay, end of year planning and close-out always take up more time than I think.

I am not at the end of this topic and have the all important answer to the question - What will an Image Warehouse do for me?

As you will recall, an Image Warehouse is a separate repository of your scanned image files complete with the meta data. The meta data must contain the key fields that allow you to match the image files to the corresponding data contained in your other line of business ("LOB") applications. For instance, the meta data in the Image repository database contains the Patient ID, which is of course also in the EMR system. Therefore, you do not need to push the image files into the EMR storage framework, you can simply create a link to the Image Warehouse.

The advantages of this architecture include:

1. Availability of the image files outside the firewall (for sharing with transaction partners).
2. Availability of the image files to users who don't have rights to the costly LOB application licenses.
3. Image capture can be tailored to the user environment, not restricted to the limited imging features of the LOB application.
4. Availability of linking the image files to other LOB applications, providing better customer service or audit capabilities.
5. Having a single image repository for multiple departments is easier to manage.

The Image Warehouse provides a single version of the truth when data and images are tied together through meta data.

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