IT & TELEMEDICINE
Presented and organised by ECR 2009 and European Hospital
Teleradiology - moving from 'black box' solutions to integrated partnership
Henrik Agrell MD is Vice President and co-founder of Telemedicine Clinic (TMC) in Barcelona, a medical imaging group that supports public and private hospitals across Europe, partly by offering professional teleradiology solutions.
Prior to co-founding TMC, Dr Agrell participated in building up NetDoktor.se, Scandinavia’s largest medical web portal. He has published several scientific articles within these fields.
The major challenges facing national healthcare systems worldwide call for new and innovative solutions for the production and delivery of healthcare services. In the field of medical imaging, there is a problematic imbalance between an increasing demand in imaging services partly due to an aging population and a growing shortage of medical staff and funding. In addition to this, more and more advanced imaging processes require access to subspecialist radiologists for an increasing number of cases. Professional teleradiology services could be one potential solution to these challenges. Centralising subspecialist competence in a highly-efficient and quality-controlled production environment and distributing this resource via integrated ITsolutions at point of need, could give public and private healthcare players access to exactly the resource they need and when they need it.
Teleradiology has been tested during decades in a huge number of more or less successful projects. However, some years ago when the first teleradiology service providers entered the market, hospitals started to use this solution on a more continuous basis. In its infancy, teleradiology was a fairy basic service with remote radiologists reporting directly to the hospitals’ RIS/PACS environments during their spare time. With growing competition and increased awareness amongst the clients, teleradiology is now rapidly developing from a “black box” outsourced solution to a highly integrated partnership, which requires different structures and new and more sophisticated production processes for teleradiology service providers to be able to meet a different level of demand in the market.
In this presentation, you will be able to follow the development of Telemedicine Clinic (TMC), the largest European teleradiology service provider, with specific focus on efficiency and various challenges related to this area.
01.03.2009
