One of the many pieces of McKesson Provider Solutions being shifted into a new, $3.4 billion venture between McKesson Corp. and Change Healthcare is an enterprise imaging line called Conserus.
If the name isn’t familiar, that is because San Francisco-based McKesson launched Conserus less than two years ago, at the 2015 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference. Conserus is the imaging part of McKesson’s overall response to the rise of value-based care, featuring an enterprise image repository, communications workflows, data exchange and an intelligence engine.
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“In a value-based care environment, nobody is going to be more successful just by reading more studies,” Ran Rumianek, executive director of workflow solutions at McKesson Provider Solutions, told MedCity News at the annual Radiological Society of North America meeting in Chicago last week. “The concept of value-based care is a reality that we all need to deal with.”
That has changed how healthcare systems approach radiology and imaging.
“Hospitals used to just buy PACS,” Rumianek said. They still have picture archiving and communication systems, for sure, but the dynamic has shifted, particularly with all the hospital mergers that have taken place in recent years. The consolidation has created data and imaging silos within organizations.
“Now, larger entities are needing to collaborate across multiple sites,” Rumianek noted. “One way to create collaboration is to buy a new system, but not everyone has tens of millions of dollars and 10 years to do it.”
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Vendor-neutral archives solved that issue for many healthcare organizations, but in a value-based environment, simply sharing images and radiology reports is not sufficient. “You need to add intelligence to workflow,” Rumianek said.
Conserus shared the story of Alberta Health Services, the largest single health authority in Canada, serving the entire province of Alberta. More than half of the province’s 4.2 million inhabitants are concentrated in the Calgary and Edmonton metro areas, but the rest are spread out over massive, sparsely populated areas.
After an adverse event in a rural area involving a physician who had not been certified in radiology, the health system added a quality inspection layer in the form of an anonymous provincial peer-review program, according to Rumianek. To do so, Alberta Health Services deployed Conserus across the province to manage 3.5 million imaging studies a year and enable anonymous, double-blind review of studies daily.
“The base of our system is a rules engine,” Rumianek explained. That allows the health system to standardize clinical practice across all of Alberta.
Another customer is a single, independent hospital outside New York City, which wanted to improve patient flow in the emergency department and reduce average length of stay by concentrating on imaging workflow. “It was hard for them to do that in a manual way,” Rumianek said.
The McKesson product helped the hospital organize its database of radiologic studies and set metrics, such as the preferred turnaround time for imaging of a stroke patient in the ED or who should read the images. “They escalate [priority] if nobody picks up a stroke case in 5 minutes,” Rumianek said.
From September to December 2015, the hospital improved some of these workflows by as much as 50 percent compared to the same period in 2015, before Conserus even existed, Rumianek reported.
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