PAGE 8

Page 8

First, the increasing deployment of advanced imaging modalities such as CT and MRI will continue to drive greater demand for PACS installations. It is widely acknowledged in the literature that the use of advanced imaging modalities will lead to a higher volume of radiology images that need to be stored, processed and retrieved. PACS has been developed specifically to deal with the storage, access, distribution and retrieval of images. This dependency suggests that there will be an increasing number of healthcare organizations, particularly hospitals, which will consider moving from film-based to filmless work environments. Secondly, despite the fact that acquiring medical imaging requires substantial resources, the technology has been increasingly deployed in developing and third-world countries. argue that there is a trend amongst the governments of these countries to expand public radiology service infrastructures and access, including the acquisition of advanced imaging modalities and applications. Due to these government initiatives, have positively anticipated the growing demand for medical imaging, particularly in the case of South East Asia and the Eastern Europe regions. Malaysia is an example of such a nation where the government via the role of Ministry of Health is responsible in making strategic decisions to deploy the technology into the public healthcare organizations. Finally, the global rise in healthcare consumerism and medical tourism will spur medical imaging and teleradiology adoptions worldwide. In the United States for example, the increased demand for radiology service has spurred rise in outsourcing of radiology services to India as well as Australia. At present, Nighthawk Radiology Services (http://www.nighthawkrad.net/) has capitalized teleradiology to create business opportunities and to take advantage of the increasing demand for radiology services argued that the main push to adopt teleradiology is to acquire the ability to tap into healthcare expertises in another institution. Medical imaging in particular can be extended to support teleradiology and teleconsultation activities. The American College of Radiology (http://www.acr.org/) defined the goals of teleradiology as follows:

• Providing consultative and interpretative radiological services in areas of need

• Making radiological consultations available in facilities without onsite radiological support

• Providing timely availability of radiological images and radiological image interpretation in emergent and non-emergent clinical care areas

• Facilitating radiological interpretations in on-call situations

• Providing subspecialty radiological support as needed

• Enhancing educational opportunities for practicing radiologists

• Promoting efficiency and quality improvement

• Sending interpreted images to referring providers

• Supporting telemedicine

• Providing direct supervision of off-site medical imaging

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9