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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.

Those who want to use Horos or OsiriX as a medical image viewer are sometimes concerned as to whether the software has been approved by the FDA. While we will get to the answer, the real question is whether or not Horos or OsiriX meet the standards required for your specific use case.

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.

Horos, a free open-source DICOM medical imaging viewer for Apple computers, has been adopted globally by tens of thousands of diverse users, from clinicians and academic researchers to lawyers and patients who want to view their medical images.

As such, after downloading Horos the next steps you should take depend on the reasons you downloaded the software in the first place.

So what are the most common use cases for Horos, and what should you do in each instance?