KLAS Tracks Early Imaging Migration to the Cloud

KLAS Research recently published a report highlighting the early experiences of imaging organizations’ transition to the cloud. In an interview with Healthcare Innovation, Monique Rasband, vice president, imaging informatics at KLAS, detailed some of the report’s findings.

Rasband said the shift to the cloud by imaging providers has been very gradual. “I think it was a bit of a mind shift, quite frankly. People didn’t want to be the first to do it, and they worried about whether it was secure,” she said. “Ironically, when you look at the data from this report, security is definitely seen as one of the benefits.”

The report found that 95 percent of 37 interviewed organizations say they have achieved their initial goals with cloud-based imaging. (Of this group, 20 are doing primary PACS production in the cloud.) Some of the perceived benefits include reduction of IT burden and increased scalability. However, only 18 percent mentioned seeing hard savings. I asked Rasband about those findings.

“In terms of defining return on investment, no one really could tell us,” Rasband said. “There was a gut feeling, but it's still a little bit tricky to measure. I think there will be some more data that gets teased out of this. This space is moving very quickly. As more larger customers move to the cloud, people will get more experience, and it won't be as new.”

Some interviewees mentioned having to overcome obstacles in the transition, such as bandwidth issues. “I've been to older hospitals where they have bandwidth issues,” she said. Some organizations in the report are rural and had bandwidth issues. Some people said they knew they have bandwidth issues, but it's not specific to imaging. So it didn’t come as a surprise and did not seem like it was a particular to the cloud imaging vendor, she said.

With so many health system mergers happening, I asked Rasband if having imaging data in the cloud could make consolidation easier.

It seems that if they really want to share, imaging is much easier than with EHR data, she responded, because you have the DICOM standard. But the cloud would seem to make it a bit easier, Rasband added, “although we don’t yet have a lot of people that had yet experienced that. In talking to some organization that are still eyeing a move to the cloud, some have said one of the motivators is that they have consolidated, and they are on two or three old PACS systems, all legacy. “You can only imagine IT saying, ‘wait, you have three PACS systems that we're going to maintain and we're going to keep the hardware secure, when you could just have one consolidation and not have that hardware piece?’”

Many of the 37 organizations reporting on their experience are health systems with smaller volumes, while the large organizations are reporting a longer than anticipated migration process. But Rasband said that by next year many of those large organizations will probably have moved to the cloud too.

“There were a few providers that are significant in size that were not quite live yet, so, of course, we can't share the data until we have it,” she said. “The next time when we have a report, we’ll be talking to those sites that are live, so we're excited to follow up on this report. Also, the timing for our report lines up with the upcoming RSNA meeting. A lot of providers are saying they have some people going who are really going to dive into cloud. I think it will be fun to follow up from RSNA to see what providers thought. I don't know — maybe they'll decide to wait another year. But I'm excited for people to get the data, see the report, and then report back to us on anything that's changed.”

In closing, Rasband stressed that this report is really just the beginning of tracking this particular cloud migration. “I don't think anyone's going to take this report and say, ‘KLAS, you're done.’ We will move as fast as the market moves, so I anticipate we will have a really good update in 2022.”