Cleveland Clinic Adds Medical Images to Their Electronic Medical Records System

You might say Cleveland Clinic has some in house expertise when it comes to big data as they have also developed their version of the Apache Hadoop data base. You can read more about it at the link below. Epic is the medical records system used by Cleveland Clinic. the types of images available include visual results of endoscopic procedures, ultrasound procedures and even photographs of patients taken in the emergency room to document a trauma.

Hadoop In Healthcare Moving In Soon? It’s the Next Big Data Base Tool Since SQL Was Introduced-Cleveland Clinic Founded a Company Using the Platform

The next move is into a cloud atmosphere the article states and they are not alone in this effort at Johns Hopkins is already making big strides in this area as well with imaging in the cloud.

Johns Hopkins Medical and IT Researchers Teaming With Harris Corporation to Create Mega Medical Imaging Cloud System

To make this work they used the Agfa HealthCare's XERO technology viewer, allowing imaging information to be viewed directly from the Clinic's Epic electronic health record (EHR) solution. BD

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Imagine your doctor ordering an ultrasound and then being able to view a written analysis of the results in your electronic medical record and the images as well. That's starting to happen at the Cleveland Clinic.

The Clinic is taking the next step in developing its electronic medical records system by allowing its doctors to see X-rays, laboratory tissue samples, photographs and any other image related to a patient's care.

"We're building a visual layer that combines patients' medical records with diagnostic images," said Louis M. Lannum, director of enterprise imaging at the Clinic.

The ongoing project at the Clinic started about six years ago with radiology, said Lannum, and it has grown to include 20 departments and a 650-terabyte disk data center. "That's a huge amount of data to be stored," he said.

To put that amount of storage space in perspective, consider that one terabyte could hold 300 hours of good quality video or the equivalent of 1,000 copies of the complete Encyclopedia Britannica (volumes A-Z). Ten terabytes could hold the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress.