RSNA Image Share Network: 20 Month Follow-Up & Results

The following was written by Anand Patel, MD, Senior Radiology Resident in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at UCSF.

Back in April, we told you that UCSF is one of the first hospitals to take part in the Image Share program, an image-exchange service that eliminates the hassle of transferring images in order to get a second opinion, consult a specialist or change hospitals and/or doctors. As the UCSF’s physician coordinator for RSNA Image Share, I presented UCSF’s 20 month follow-up results at RSNA 2013.

From 2000 to 2009, Medicare expenditures on imaging nearly doubled from $6.5 billion to $11.7 billion. 10 to 20 percent of these costs were due to duplicate imaging exams, usually because images from prior studies were not available. With Image Share, however, patients gain direct control of their images and interpretations via a cloud-based electronic personal health record and can share access with any provider, regardless of institutional affiliation.

Patients are becoming more in tune with their health and they want to control their health records, analyze them and find out what the information means. The results of a study of 252 enrolled patients and 81 physicians confirm that patients are interested in having access to their health records. Of those surveyed, 95 percent expressed the need for a patient-controlled electronic personal health record and four out of five patients and nine out of ten physicians were satisfied with the RSNA Image Share network. Two-thirds of the patients agreed or strongly agreed that health record privacy is important, but 90 percent of the patients were comfortable with the amount of privacy provided by RSNA Image Share.

Of course, more study is needed among physicians, since most UCSF physicians already have full electronic access to their patients' images through the institution's electronic health record system, but we will continue to analyze the effects and satisfaction of the RSNA Image Share!

For more information, please see here.

Please note that starting April 1, 2017, the RSNA image share network will no longer accept new patients or images. If you currently have a PHR account you will continue to have access to your images but will not be able to add new images electronically (uploading from a CD will still be allowed).

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