Study Collection

Collection is the process of gathering and transporting studies from remote and dissimilar locations. The practice must take into account the existing workflow of the sending institutions, and consider their different internal security protocols to handle HIPAA compliance. For example, a facility may be willing to provide a VPN connection, but require manual authentication every certain number of hours, creating the need for out-of-workflow operations multiple times each day. In other cases, approval of VPNs is a very lengthy process, causing delays in the startup of image acquisition as well as creating difficulties when transport impacting elements of the workflow change. With every location having different security policies, management of the acquisition process requires many resources at both the sending site and the teleradiology company.

AG Mednet facilitates collection operations by providing a solution that is:

• deployed in under two hours
  
  
• workflow compliant in any imaging department
  
  
• secure (without VPNs) and does not require any ports opened in a firewall
  
  
• efficient by taking advantage of patent pending DICOM grooming technology
  
  
• fast by making use of the world’s largest DICOM exchange network
  
  
• stable with 99.9999% uptime
  
  
• monitored 24 x 7 x 365 both at the edge and the core of the network

Study Routing

Routing is the process of distributing studies collected from sending sites to the proper location to be interpreted. There are three common places where cases are delivered for interpretation: (1) a central reading location; (2) a full featured reading workstation at a remote radiologist’s reading site; and (3) a central rendering server from where remote radiologists with thin clients can display them. If a teleradiology operation consists of multiple, distributed practices, each with its own reading infrastructure, there is a need to be able to deliver studies to each of them (and some of their radiologists’ homes). In many cases, this requires multiple VPNs at each client site, one for each of the practices. In others, it requires an upload of cases to central locations from where they are downloaded either to central rendering server, or to a radiologist’s individual reader. In the first case, changes in workflow or schedule require changes at the client sites (e.g., re-send a case to a different location). In the second, the lack of flow-through presents additional delays in the movement of studies.

AG Mednet facilitates routing operations by providing a solution that:

• minimizes the work required by the sending site
  
  
• allows teleradiology operations to set and change routes without requiring any changes at the sending site
  
  
• enables teleradiology operations to re-route studies on demand
  
  
• delivers studies to one or more destinations through a single send operation
  
  
• guarantees delivery of studies through persistent retry logic