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If you run a veterinary practice, you are often called upon to be a jack of all trades. If you are like many practices, you might not generate a high enough volume of scans to justify employing a full-time radiologist to analyze the images generated by your medical imaging technology. As a result, you probably do these reads yourself or rely on other generalist veterinarians to conduct the analysis and come up with diagnoses for the beloved family pets you see each day.

More and more, we are seeing health care facilities and medical professionals share imaging studies among referring physicians, specialists and even patients. Surgeons are taking their tablets to view scans in the operating room, diagnosing physicians are asked to evaluate advanced medical imaging such as MRIs or CT scans while on the go or on vacation, and specialists crave an easy and inexpensive way to share images with their patients.

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.