Modernizing Medical Imaging for a National Telemedicine Program - SwissCom Health

A national, telemedicine program decided to modernize its medical imaging exchange capabilities to allow medical teams at more than 200 health facilities to share, review, and interpret patients' imaging studies regardless of location. To increase usability, performance and optimize costs, the team required a zero-footprint, regulated viewer and a secure public cloud infrastructure.

Challenge

The Softneta, MedDream Viewer was an ideal viewer choice because of its lightweight deployment footprint, intuitive design, multi-modal object support and local regulatory clearances. Help was needed to coordinate and execute requirements generation and testing with the cloud team. The project entailed working across 3 countries and 2 continents and required deep technical and use case expertise.

Project Execution

We were retained to coordinate the evaluation, scoping and technical integration needs across two vendors and the client organization, being mindful of the multi-generational plan for the project. Critical to achieving the cost and performance requirements of the image exchange was robust interoperability of the MedDream viewing solution with Azure DICOM and FHIR services. We coordinated project and technical teams in North America and Europe to test the Azure DICOM Services' capabilities to ingest, map and persist complex, real-world 'dirty' data while flexing the DICOM Web integration abilities of the MedDream Viewing solution. Considerable experience and understanding of the DICOM standard, interoperability and user-experience were relied upon to conduct testing, synthesize results, and develop change requests for the technologies at both Microsoft and Softneta while coordinating across multiple time zones.

Outcomes

• The Softneta MedDream viewing solution powers the national telemedicine's platform's image exchange.
• Multiple findings from testing in a nation-scale project leading to numerous technical and administrative feature enhancements to the Azure DICOM services resulting in a more robust offering.
• On-track for sizing, staging, testing and deployment of a cloud-native infrastructure in 2023 powered by Azure.

Collaboration

Softneta MedDream

A web-based DICOM Viewer for PACS that is aimed at making diagnostic & viewing medical images seamless.

Microsoft Azure

Azure is a cloud computing platform supported by Microsoft.

SwissCom Health

is part of Switzerland's leading telecoms company and one of its leading IT companies - SwissCom. The organization is a reliable and trustworthy partner for digitizing healthcare facilities processes and connecting them with the growing health world. www.swisscom.ch/en