Technological advancements have allowed us to get better images of patients’ bodies from different scans but that came with a cost. The image sizes are quite large. It’s not very feasible to share DICOM images through portable devices like we used to. There were other problems as well. Thankfully, we found a solution to all of them. We can now share DICOM images remotely and without the help of a portable device. We will talk about why remote DICOM sharing is important.
How DICOM Sharing is Different
DICOM sharing or medical image sharing means sharing medical imaging files that are in DICOM format. Sharing is possible between doctors inside the same department and the medical facility, sharing is also possible outside the medical facility. But DICOM images cannot be shared like other image files. If you want to share files that are in JPEG/PNG/GIF format, you can do it quite easily. You can send them using e-mail or through various social media platforms, or copy them into flash drives, etc. and send them to the recipient.
There are hundreds of apps to compress the image files so that you can share them more easily and laptops or PCs or phones come with built-in software to recognize those files. DICOM files, however, cannot be viewed using the standard image viewers. You need software that is compatible with DICOM format to recognize and process the DICOM files. In addition to that, DICOM images are high-quality images that have large size and they take up a lot of space which makes it more difficult to share them easily.
Why Remote DICOM Image Sharing is So Important
Cloud-based DICOM image sharing solves the problem of the traditional DICOM image sharing methods’ confinement. Cloud provides more space, access, reliability, and security than before. But one may still ask why is it important to remotely share DICOM images? We provide our answer below.
Specialist Care Referral: Sometimes doctors refer their patients to specialists and the specialists would want to see the medical images. Remote sharing makes it easier for them to acquire those images from their own desk rather than to go to the doctor who referred.
Primary Care Transfer: Patients change their geographical location all the time. Those patients need treatment from a different medical facility than the original one and the new one would need those images that can be accessed remotely if those images are in the cloud.
Patient Ownership: Patients nowadays are more aware of their health issues and have a greater say in their medical care than before and if they want to see their medical images from home, they can do so easily.
Information Spread: Physicians need medical images to teach classes and for research purposes. They can do it remotely.
Conclusion
We had to go to the cinema theaters to watch a film; we can still do it, but we can also watch them from our home. The more information can be easily spread, the more convenient it is for everyone to access them. This is the main reason why remote DICOM image sharing is so important.