New Health Image Exchange Network for State of Kansas Solves Problem of Image Sharing Among Rural Kansas Hospitals and Clinics

KANSAS CITY, MO, April 05, 2014 (Press-News.org) The current process of image sharing at many rural hospitals in Kansas (and other states) typically involves expensive and problematic CD burning. Recently a new solution called the Kansas Health Image Exchange has become available, and it's changing the way patients and physicians receive, store and access images for better patient care.

In addition to physicians being unable to open or read images from x-rays, CT scans and other modalities on CDs, rural hospitals face added pressure for making sure that the data on CDs remains protected and in compliance with HIPAA. Recently Offsite Image Management has presented the solution to these problems in a new initiative, the Kansas Health Image Exchange (KHIE). The KHIE is a dedicated health image exchange option for the state of Kansas, and the first of its kind, available now at http://www.kansas-hie.com.

OffSite, a national leader in vendor-neutral image management, launched the Kansas Health Image Exchange to allow hospitals and clinics simple, accessible and affordable image sharing with no contract commitments or subscriptions. For the first time, images are available through a cloud-based and secure URL - and clinics simply pay for the images they use in the platform, as they use them.

Not only does the launch of KHIE on a no commitment contract level solve serious image-sharing problems, but it means the rural hospitals in Kansas who play a major role in bringing healthcare services to residents can do so more efficiently and effectively. They're also closer to allowing patients access and control of their own data.

"Rural Kansas residents deserve the same quality of care as those in the urban centers of Kansas, and we have the solutions that help healthcare providers deliver quality through easy, accessible image-sharing on a Virtual CD platform," says Lasha Dalakishvili, president of Offsite Image Management. "The results impact all levels of the hospital and the community, including more efficient and quicker image sharing for patients and lower costs overall for HIPAA compliance."

The KHIE offers the Virtual CD service as part of a dedicated health image exchange option that all healthcare providers in Kansas can utilize. Virtual CD is a federated solution that allows hospitals 100 percent control over who they share their data with, such as patients, physicians or other hospitals. "With no commitment contracts, rural providers won't be tied to an expensive plan that prices them out of the option to provide quality care," says Dalakishvili."They simply sign up with OffSite, we set up the secure image-sharing process, and then they pay for the images they need to share. It's incredibly easy, it's safe and it's in the cloud."

Offsite is already working with rural hospitals and clinics across several states to implement the Virtual CD for image sharing, and continues to see costs decline for these hospitals as levels of staff and patient satisfaction increase. The Kansas Health Image Exchangealso reduces the redundancies that every healthcare provider strives to avoid, such as problems linking one hospital to the next. OffSite uses its Honeycomb software solution to seamlessly share and transfer images that are stored in the cloud.

"Kansas has been waiting for a solution for the problem of image exchange across the rural communities, so the wait is over," says Dalakishvili. "Unlike other solutions, there is no membership required and no special software needed for the Virtual CD process."

Once a hospital or clinic decides to start using the virtual CD service, Offsite Image Management goes step by step through the process of moving images from the hospital into the cloud. Then they establish a secure and encrypted user ID, which gives users a URL address to log into online and view or share images with a unique password. Finally, the user pays only for the exams that they share within the Kansas Health Image Exchange cloud. Offsite will also be offering a Health Image Exchange portal (independent of virtual CD), which will allow participating hospitals to query any patient data that has been stored or offloaded through virtual CD.

"We're here and available for rural Kansas hospitals and clinics. We want to help them decrease costs, increase patient care, decrease redundancy across services and save costs for patients, also," adds Dalakishvili.

Visit http://www.kansas-hie.comto learn more. Visit OffSite Image Management online at http://www.offsiteimagemgt.com to learn more about Virtual CD and their other solutions for radiological image storing and sharing. With more than 58 million images archived to-date, Offsite is quickly becoming one of the nation's leaders in vendor neutral image sharing for healthcare facilities.