An Enterprise Imaging Journey Starts With Defining Your True North, Then Throwing in a Helping of Flexibility, says Hartford HealthCare Chief Clinical Innovation Officer & Chief Medical Informatics Officer Dr. Barry Stein

In a recent interview with healthsystemsCIO, Dr. Barry Stein, Chief Clinical Innovation Officer and Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Hartford HealthCare, shared insights into the organization’s enterprise imaging strategy. Dr. Stein and Anthony discuss:















* How Hartford is streamlining access to patient images across their vast network, and how Epic fits into the process

* The importance of balancing stakeholder needs

* Integrating artificial intelligence for personalized care

* How to continue the evolution of enterprise imaging to include additional data modalities, such as digital pathology and intraoperative video, while maintaining a focus on interoperability and patient-centered care

* Hartford’s application rationalization process















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Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemsCIO’s Interview with Dr. Barry Stein, Chief Clinical Innovation Officer and Chief Medical Informatics Officer. Dr. Stein is also a practicing vascular and interventional radiologist with Hartford HealthCare. Dr. Stein, thanks so much for joining me.

Dr. Stein: Thank you, Anthony. Pleasure to be here.

Anthony: We’re going to talk today about Enterprise Imaging but first, if you want to tell me a little bit about your organization and your role.

Dr. Stein: Hartford HealthCare is the largest integrated healthcare delivery system in Connecticut, over 40,000 employees, 500 locations and it’s a fully integrated healthcare system taking care of patients from birth until the end, across multiple specialties, in fact, all specialties in a very comprehensive way. Our focus is improving access to healthcare, affordability of healthcare, improving equity and excellence, meaning quality and safety. Those are our 4 strategic pillars and the vision at Harford HealthCare is to be the most trusted, more personalized coordinated care.

Anthony: Excellent. As I mentioned, we’re going to talk about Enterprise Imaging which is a term that would be interesting to hear you define.  What does it mean and why are we trying to get there and then what are some of the things that we do that further that goal.

Dr. Stein: Enterprise Imaging is a concept that has been around probably for more than a decade and it really started with PACS. Very quickly many healthcare systems organically developed a hodgepodge of different PAC systems, different ways for clinicians to see images and as healthcare systems grew, it became more and more difficult to seamlessly provide access to the entire imaging history of a patient for the clinician.

In other words, if a patient went to one hospital with one PAC system, and needed to go to another hospital in the same healthcare system, because the different PACS are not connected on one particular platform, it became extraordinarily difficult for clinicians to have a full picture of the imaging history. When the electronic health record came about, most of the electronic health record companies did not have an imaging platform. They certainly had a platform to collect structured data and non-structured narrative data but not imaging. It was a significant element that was left out of the strategy of any electronic health record.

At Harford HealthCare, we have 7 acute care facilities and over 500 ambulatory facilities in over 50-odd imaging centers, and you can imagine how difficult it would be if we didn’t have one enterprise imaging platform.