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Hospital budgets today are under siege. Reimbursement cuts and governmental subsidies, often in the millions of dollars, are tightening the purses of hospital administrators across the country — an even tougher pill to swallow as the cost of care and medical professionals' salaries continue to grow.

Despite these constrained budgets, we've found that most hospitals still purchase and maintain expensive on-site, name-brand, picture archiving and communications systems (PACS). Contrary to their budgetary realities, hospital staff aren't seeking out perfectly viable alternatives and considering new opportunities to save substantial amounts of expense on their PACS medical imaging solutions.

So why are hospitals ignoring these expense-saving PACS options, and how can they break out of this line of thinking?

The field of teleradiology — in which radiologists view and interpret medical images in a geography that is separate from the scan location — has grown rapidly in recent years, with profound impacts on the medical industry. As in so many other cases, technology is able to connect specialized resources separated by geographic distance in pursuit of a common goal - patient diagnosis and treatment.

Physicians need access to the highest-quality and most up-to-date information in order to make the best decisions for their patients. However, patient data is often spread across multiple platforms that don't always play nicely with each other. Electronic health record (EHR) systems store textual information like patient visit notes and test results. Separately, picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) provide storage and access to medical images.

The possibility of internet disruptions and outages is one of the main reasons why some medical providers are reluctant to switch from their current onsite PACS medical imaging storage solution to a cloud-based option. For many, the benefits of the cloud seem very alluring, but the downsides that come with an outage seem too risky for a business that depends on being constantly connected.

If you’ve ever thought of sharing medical images or any other Protected Health Information (PHI) using Dropbox you are not alone. Dropbox is one of the most popular file sharing services and is on millions of desktop computers around the world. Of course HIPAA makes healthcare professionals shake in their boots when they consider whether Dropbox, or any other file sharing system, meets the HIPAA privacy test. But there is way more that you should consider before using file sharing for your medical images.