For years, healthcare has pursued the promise of interoperability. We’ve built powerful Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and massive Vendor Neutral Archives (VNAs). Yet, for the clinician on the front lines, a deep chasm remains. The patient’s complete imaging story is often stuck on the other side of this gap, trapped in a separate system or locked on a physical CD. This is interoperability’s last-mile problem: the critical gap between data being available and being actionable at the point of care.

The High Cost of the Data Chasm

This disconnect creates a host of issues that directly impact patient care and operational efficiency.

• Incomplete Patient Records: Clinicians must log into multiple systems to get a full view of a patient’s imaging history. This can lead to missed diagnoses, delayed treatments, and duplicate exams. Imagine a patient with chest pain; a clinician in the Emergency Department might waste critical minutes switching between applications to find a prior chest X-ray in one system and a recent cardiac CT in another.

   

• Wasted Time and Resources: Staff spend valuable time manually locating, transferring, and reconciling patient information. This inefficiency increases operational costs and takes time away from patient care.

   

• Poor Collaboration: A lack of centralized access to images makes it difficult for a multidisciplinary care team to collaborate effectively on a patient’s case.

   

• Patient Access: Patients often struggle to access and share their own imaging records, especially when they need a second opinion or are transferring care.

Building the Bridge from Data to Workflow

Enterprise Imaging directly addresses data consolidation by creating a centralized archive. Unifying data is the first step. The next is building a bridge to bring that data into the clinician’s native workflow. This is where FHIR and SMART on FHIR create a powerful combination.

• The Foundation: FHIR FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is the blueprint and the raw material for our bridge. It’s the universal language that allows disparate systems, like an EHR and a VNA, to speak to each other and exchange health data in a standardized way. FHIR provides the essential foundation required to bridge the gap.

   

• The On-Ramp: SMART on FHIR If FHIR is the foundation, SMART on FHIR is the secure, intelligent on-ramp that makes the bridge usable. SMART (Substitutable Medical Applications, Reusable Technologies) provides the rules for authorization and app launch, allowing clinicians to securely open an imaging application directly from within a patient’s chart. It closes interoperability’s last mile by bringing relevant data directly to the clinician’s fingertips.

Crossing the Bridge: Medicom’s Apps in Action

In collaboration with some of the nation’s largest academic medical centers, Medicom has developed a suite of SMART on FHIR applications that turn this theory into reality.

Imagine a cardiologist receives a patient referral with a disc containing an echocardiogram from an outside hospital. Instead of a complex, manual upload, her workflow is transformed:

• The On-Ramp: From within the EHR, her assistant launches Medicom’s Data Import app. This is the secure, contextual SMART on FHIR launch in action.

   

• Seamless Transfer: The app quickly pulls the study from the disc. In the background, our Patient Match engine automatically reconciles the patient’s demographics to prevent a duplicate record.

   

• Actionable Intelligence: The physician receives a Checkpoint notification directly in the patient’s chart that new, verified imaging is available.

With one click, she has a clean, consolidated view of all new data without ever leaving her primary workflow. The gap is closed.

Our Guiding Principles for a Connected System

This deep integration is a core pillar of Medicom’s approach to interoperability, which is built on three key principles:

• Enterprise Unification: We consolidate disparate imaging data sources into a single, vendor-neutral platform.

   

• Deep EHR Integration: We use SMART on FHIR to embed imaging sharing directly into EHR workflows, providing a complete picture of patient health.

   

• Intelligent Workflow Automation: We leverage technologies like Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate and improve clinical workflows. By closing the data gap, we create a unified stream that AI can analyze to automatically tag key findings, further streamlining administrative tasks.

By combining the power of SMART on FHIR with our comprehensive platform, we enable enterprise imaging interoperability that delivers a more complete picture of patient health within the systems that clinicians use most.

To learn more about how Medicom can help your health system streamline imaging workflows, please contact us today.