By Murray A. Reicher, MD
After nearly 30 years as a practicing physician, I don't have a day go by in my practice where a patient would not benefit from more timely availability of records from other institutions. Now, however, thanks to cloud computing, the delays and inappropriate repetitive testing attributable to unavailable records may finally be coming to an end. The limitation is no longer the technology itself but simply the speed of adoption.
All caregivers are familiar with a variety of clinical scenarios where unavailable records hinder patient care and often pose unnecessary risks:
1. The patient presenting to an emergency room at 2 a.m. who underwent a CT scan in an outside outpatient imaging center in the last week.
2. The cancer patient who travels to a tertiary referral center to see an oncologist, only to find out that critical records essential for his evaluation have not arrived.
3. The woman who undergoes a screening mammogram, but does not receive a report for a week or more as the provider waits for prior exams essential for comparison.
4. The man who undergoes a lung biopsy for a pulmonary nodule because his old "films," which might have proved the nodule benign, are no longer available.
Scenarios like these are the source of avoidable morbidity, delay in care, wasteful costs, and excessive radiation from redundant diagnostic imaging.
As a physician (radiologist) and chairman of a company that provides medical imaging information systems, I have dreamed of the solution to this problem since my early days in medical school in the late 1970s.
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