Penn Medicine Turns to Physician Portal to Solve Image-Sharing Challenge

In a moving speech to the 2016 Health Datapalooza conference in Washington, D.C., Vice President Joe Biden spoke passionately about his son, Beau Biden, who died in 2015 from brain cancer. He used some details from the experience of Beau Biden’s treatment to express disappointment with the state of interoperability the industry has achieved. He said it was extremely frustrating that the imaging data couldn’t be sent from Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., to MD Anderson Cancer Center electronically because they were on different systems, and disks had to be sent back and forth.

Fast-forward a few years and most health systems are still struggling with sharing images. Imaging is one of the most-costly components of patient care and is historically fraught with redundancy due to constraints with image sharing among providers.

Health systems often cope with this challenge by burning a CD and handing it to the patient to transport to primary care physicians, specialists and other members of their care team. In August 2018, recognizing that the need for providers and patients to seamlessly share images has never been more apparent, Penn Medicine in Philadelphia made a significant change to its portal for external physicians, called PhysicianLink, to allow referring physicians outside of the Penn Medicine system to securely view radiology images.

Historically, physicians outside the institution who referred patients to Penn Medicine for diagnostic radiology studies could only review the text results of those studies. Now, along with the diagnostic result, a link appears that permits the external provider to launch a PACS image directly using the same clinical imaging viewer as the health system.

In a recent interview, Christine VanZandbergen, associate vice president of IS applications at Penn Medicine, describes the challenge the innovative project addressed. “When patients were referred from other providers and became part of the Penn community of patients, we didn’t have a good way to get those images back to their primary care team,” she says. “They are the ones who have a longer-term relationship with the patient. And while they were able to see a report, from a clinical perspective, it is important to have not just a report, but also the ability to view those images and have those conversations with the patient. Trying to do that from a report doesn’t provide the same level of care as being able to view the actual images.”