Data Migration in Radiology Department ? Things to Remember

Posted by Nisharao on December 11th, 2017

Data is of paramount importance in any industry, even more so in the medical industry when a piece of data can be a decider of the life and heath of a patient. A huge hospital can have thousands of bits of data that need to be properly stored and archived, so that it can be easily retreived when needed. Maintaing paper records of thousands of patients is not only time consuming, but also space consuming. Moreover, the printed forms and filed documents may be damaged over time because of unuse, pests, or accidents. It goes without saying that medical service providers should look for ways to automate radiology work flow to digitize data entry, transfer, and storage. Data migration and archiving of the Radiology Information System Workflow needs to be done in a professional manner by reputed software vendors.

 Archiving and data migration can be done during or immediately after:

• Mergers and acquisitions
• System/hardware replacement or upgrade
• Adoption of new radiology information system workflow
• When data from different platforms are being consolidated
• While creating a single image repository

 The problems that could occur during data migration process are:

• Collating and consolidating years of accumulated data
• Initial digitizing of images and patient data
• Correlating patient information to the data in the imaging systems
• Huge volume of images and information
• Loss of data due to human errors or system malfunction
• Images with high complexity can be more difficult to move and store

 One can never be too careful while dealing with huge volumes of highly sensitive data stored in the medical records. Medical service providers can avail the services of healthcare IT vendors who have experience and expertise in handling huge volumes of data for migration and archiving. The vendor will set standards for data migration and have the flexibility to handle images of various sizes and complexities. If you’re thinking of data migration in the radiology workflow, then keep all these points in mind and consult a reliable healthcare software vendor.