August 29, 2014 — Nuance Communications announced it has achieved an industry-first milestone in sharing 3 billion medical images through the Nuance PowerShare Network. This reflects steady growth of approximately 30 percent each year as the technology gains more widespread adoption in hospitals and facilities securely sharing patient medical images using the cloud.
The Nuance PowerShare Network is the largest medical imaging network that securely connects physicians, patients, government agencies, specialty medical societies and others with the information needed to support improved clinical decision making and enhanced patient outcomes. Today, it is used by more than 2,000 provider organizations, including Children’s of Alabama, Intermountain Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente of Georgia and Orlando Health to improve care coordination as patients seek care from multiple physicians and healthcare organizations.
“Nuance is driving rapid adoption of cloud-based medical image and report sharing to address the growing importance of collaborative and value-based care, and help provider organizations provide better service to referring physicians,” said Peter Durlach, senior vice president of marketing and strategy, Nuance Communications. “This leads to better communication not just between caregivers, but also with their patients to improve patient satisfaction and promote better health.”
“The PowerShare Network has overwhelmingly improved the efficiency of our clinical workflow, especially in regards to outside images,” said Josh Pavlovec, PACS administrator, Children’s of Alabama. “Physicians love that they don’t have to deal with a CD anymore. The network takes their mind off of whether or not they can access an image — allowing them to focus on treating patients.”
Physicians across the care spectrum rely on medical images to properly assess patients, but they also need the associated diagnostic report to accompany these images to provide the proper diagnostic interpretation regarding a patient’s condition and optimal care plan. The PowerShare Network makes these patient images and associated diagnostic reports available anywhere at any time via the cloud, leveraging Nuance’s own PowerScribe 360 reporting and communication platform, which is used in more than 1,600 provider organizations across North America.
In addition, PowerShare enables provider organizations to seamlessly leverage and enhance the critical investments they have made in their electronic health record (EHR), picture archiving and communication system (PACS), vendor-neutral archive (VNA) and enterprise viewer technology via its software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
Adding to the rapid adoption of the PowerShare Network is a mobile app that allows physicians to view images and reports remotely using mobile devices, helping them to stay productive and monitor their patients’ conditions once they are out of the hospital or leave the office. According to a recent Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) survey, 70 percent of clinicians use mobile devices to view patient information.
For more information: www.nuance.com/products/PowerShareNetwork