US gov’t announces ‘Ditch the Disk’ campaign

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) launched a Diagnostic Imaging Acceleration (“Ditch the Disk”) Workgroup late last month. It aims to make imaging data seamlessly and electronically retrievable across organizations, within clinical workflows and by patients.

The initiative is modelled on goals long championed by the ACR®-led #DitchTheDisk campaign, launched in 2019 with participation from RSNA and industry partners. The campaign promoted electronic access to diagnostic-quality images through advocacy, standards development, industry collaboration and social media outreach. Today, ACR and other provider organizations continue to support its goals through a variety of related initiatives.

CMS announced the Ditch the Disk Workgroup as part of its broader Health Tech Ecosystem initiative, which includes a series of voluntary pledges to improve health data interoperability and patient access to information.

Member organizations must pledge:
“We commit to the CMS Interoperability Framework and to make imaging data retrievable across organizations, within clinical workflows, and by patients completely, quickly, and without friction. We commit to exposing imaging through FHIR ImagingStudy, DICOMweb, and SMART Imaging Access; responding to all valid patient access, treatment, and payment queries with full-fidelity DICOM images, diagnostic reports, and complete metadata, no partial responses, no degraded data; and eliminating physical media where digital exchange is possible. We are committed to ditching the disk, one study at a time.”

Already, early adopters include:

Andor Health
b.well Connected Health
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
Cleveland Clinic
DASION (data-to-decision)
DataSpring
Emory
Epic
Fasten Health
Froedtert Thedacare
HealthEx
Intellirad (previously Ambra)
Kno2
MedOauth
MiHIN
My Medical Images
myDigiRecords
Particle Health
RSNA
SIIM
Tennesssee Oncology
University of California, San Francisco
Upenn
Weill Cornell
Well by BAIRWISE

For its part, Epic released a new diagnostic image exchange solution that enables healthcare providers at Epic-connected health systems to retrieve and share diagnostic-quality medical images, such as CT scans, X-rays and MRIs, with a single click.

Released this month, the capability is now available across the Epic community.

Using open image exchange standards and its existing interoperability pipelines, Epic expanded its Care Everywhere platform to radiology images. The diagnostic image exchange tool reduces the need for manual image transfers and helps clinicians access prior scans more quickly, which can help prevent duplicate imaging and speed diagnosis and treatment, according to executives at the EHR company.

“The goal is that when a patient is coming in for a visit, that might be for a specialist consult, it might be for a second opinion, it might be follow-up on a cancer diagnosis, we need to make sure that the imaging studies done in the past are available to the provider for prep leading up to the visit, and then for use during the visit with the patient,” Matt Doyle, Epic’s director of interoperability, told Fierce Healthcare in an exclusive interview about the new exchange solution.

“This is using the same workflows that we’ve created before where providers can really choose what they need to see. They can retrieve it in real-time to access as part of their care with the patient and really making sure that the provider is in the driver’s seat to get that information, so that they can focus on what’s most important, the patient sitting there in front of them who needs their medical judgment and expertise,” Doyle said.

Care Everywhere, which has been in use since 2008, is Epic’s health information network that facilitates the exchange of 30 million patient charts every day, half of those with other platforms, according to the company’s website. The company hit a monthly milestone of 914 million records exchanged in June.