Cost Saving benefits With LifeVoxel

Radiology is a critical field in medical science and still holds a vast potential which remains under-utilized. Part of the reason for this is the huge costs incurred due to conventional Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS). This is extremely problematic especially in developing and underdeveloped regions of the world where at times such expenditure on outdated technology ends up diverting financial and physical resources from more critical areas within the field of healthcare and medicine. Maintaining a conventional on-premise PACS might have been a prudent idea some decades ago but today the scenario has changed and today based on a proper cost-benefit analysis it can be clearly understood that PACS is just too costly for imaging centers.

Let us first take a look at how PACS hurts imaging centers and other stakeholders.

Huge Upfront Investment

A great deal of the physical server and network infrastructure is maintained by clients who still go in with the existing PACS technology. PACS includes data-base, file and web servers as well as storage and networking infrastructure. This leads to extra expenses incurred on several grounds. Huge amounts would be required as an upfront investment to set up PACS servers, the server rooms and other PACS related infrastructure. Growing storage requirement from these large medical images requires continuously upgrading PACS servers and infrastructure.

Maintenance and Upgradation

But the expenses do not end there. Ensuring proper running and maintenance of physical storage infrastructure would drain imaging centers of more resources. High costs would be incurred on electricity and server cooling. In addition, periodic upgrades would be needed on-site. Servers often needed to be restarted when performance becomes sub-par.

IT Staff

A dedicated team of personnel would be required to address the issues of maintenance and upgrading of the PACS infrastructure as well as other exigencies that may pop up. The IT staff could be better utilized than mundane tasks of updating or supporting PACS servers.

Costs incurred per study and on sharing

A careful analysis of the costs incurred per study while using conventional PACS would be helpful.

Many hidden costs effect the total standard functional price per study. Capital costs for setting up the PACS infrastructure along with space, physician delayed time accessing images over Internet, workstations, mobile access tools including advanced visualizations, CD creation and distribution, technical support, power and cooling related costs make up more than 50% of the standard functional price.

It gets more expensive in the case of PACS downtime and catastrophic downtime. The combined additional cost incurred in respect would be more than 50% of the standard functional price, which drives the comprehensive functionality price per study to a wasteful high.

The fallout

All these costs are a liability to the provider and patients. It is a wastage of money and compromises the entire healthcare environment. .

According to Independent publications by McKinsey, the Mayo Clinic and The Journal of Clinical Oncology, Poor clarity and image download capability may lead to patients being misdiagnosed almost 50% of times and $27B annual imaging spend in the US is wasted*1

How LifeVoxel helps cut costs and improve patient care

LifeVoxel offers solutions which deliver the most advanced technology and helps cut costs across various stages. AI Visual GPU computing technology is employed to bring about the best results. The proprietary patented cloud ensures that users would not have to spend huge upfront costs for setting up physical storage infrastructure. This would also mean that there would be no need to spend on cooling, electricity and other maintenance costs of the servers.

A pay-per-use model is created by opting for LifeVoxel medical imaging SaaS platform. This allows radiology departments to downscale or upscale their activities with ease and devote more resources to core activities. Efficient safe-guards are put in place by the company to prevent catastrophic downtime and ensure that the system is up and running round the clock. LifeVoxel's platform allows for the integration of various software and is compatible across different devices. Costs and time incurred while sharing medical images would be cut down as well. LifeVoxel invested decade worth of research and development and continue to do so towards constantly improving its technology and delivering better results at lower costs.

An efficient cost analysis of conventional RIS, PACS, Image Sharing, VNA or Enterprise Image and LifeVoxel solutions clearly points out the edge enjoyed by the latter and the remarkable savings that can be brought about its adoption.

Where to now?

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