Interactive Multimedia Reporting Technical Considerations: HIMSS-SIIM Collaborative White Paper.

Despite technological advances in the analysis of digital images for medical consultations, many health information systems lack the ability to correlate textual descriptions of image findings linked to the actual images. Images and reports often reside in separate silos in the medical record throughout the process of image viewing, report authoring, and report consumption. Forward-thinking centers and early adopters have created interactive reports with multimedia elements and embedded hyperlinks in reports that connect the narrative text with the related source images and measurements. Most of these solutions rely on proprietary single-vendor systems for viewing and reporting in the absence of any encompassing industry standards to facilitate interoperability with the electronic health record (EHR) and other systems. International standards have enabled the digitization of image acquisition, storage, viewing, and structured reporting. These provide the foundation to discuss enhanced reporting. Lessons learned in the digital transformation of radiology and pathology can serve as a basis for interactive multimedia reporting (IMR) across image-centric medical specialties. This paper describes the standard-based infrastructure and communications to fulfill recently defined clinical requirements through a consensus from an international workgroup of multidisciplinary medical specialists, informaticists, and industry participants. These efforts have led toward the development of an Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) profile that will serve as a foundation for interoperable interactive multimedia reporting.

DICOMweb™: Background and Application of the Web Standard for Medical Imaging.

This paper describes why and how DICOM, the standard that has been the basis for medical imaging interoperability around the world for several decades, has been extended into a full web technology-based standard, DICOMweb. At the turn of the century, healthcare embraced information technology, which created new problems and new opportunities for the medical imaging industry; at the same time, web technologies matured and began serving other domains well. This paper describes DICOMweb, how it extended the DICOM standard, and how DICOMweb can be applied to problems facing healthcare applications to address workflow and the changing healthcare climate.