Casa della Salute: more securely accessing and viewing of medical images anytime, anywhere

Until recently, each of Casa della Salute’s four diagnostic clinics had its own medical imaging Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) and related storage. Managing the different systems was complex and exchanging medical images, such as X-rays, between sites required many manual steps. This setup could make it challenging to provide patients with rapid, quality care. For example, radiologists couldn’t easily share medical images with physicians or other radiologists, so obtaining a second opinion on a patient’s medical image could take a day or longer.  

 Google Cloud + ZEEROmed Imaging Results

 

• Enables diagnostic viewing and reporting from any browser in any clinic
• Reduces time spent obtaining medical images, helping staff be more productive
• Provides better patient care and treatment outcomes
• Scales easily to meet the organization’s growing storage and resource needs
• Reduces time to share images from hours to minutes

 

Enabling change

Solutions: Migration  

Casa della Salute turned to Google Cloud Technology Partner O3 Enterprise S.r.l, a Trieste, Italy-based company specializing in imaging solutions management. The O3 Enterprise ZeeroMED suite is a fully integrated Radiology Information System (RIS) and PACS platform that enables complete workflow management within healthcare facilities and radiology departments.

"ZeeroMED has greatly improved the chances of giving better care to our patients. Having a system that streamlines every phase of the process, from the booking to the delivery of reports, makes our centers more efficient in terms of optimization of time and security for our patients," says Omar Lafi, IT Manager at Casa della Salute.

ZeeroMED is hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Within the ZeeroMED cloud application, Casa della Salute leverages Compute Engine for its hosted virtual machine infrastructure; Persistent Disk for short-term image storage that can be quickly backed up and resized; and Cloud Storage for flexible long-term storage. “It’s an extremely efficient solution for managing a large amount of storage,” says Lorenzo Rizzatto, CTO of O3 Enterprise. “Casa della Salute acquired about 2TB of medical imaging data in the first few months of being on GCP. Soon, they’ll be adding about 5TB a year, which is a lot given their size.”

In addition, O3 Enterprise is using Firebase for more secure user authentication and other functions within the Casa della Salute mobile app.

GCP makes it easy for O3 Enterprise to scale compute resources for Casa della Salute “We can easily add more servers and expand storage whenever they’re needed, which is important to growing organizations like Casa della Salute,” Lorenzo says. GCP provides a highly reliable, easily accessible, centralized cloud foundation as well, making it fast and easy to more securely distribute medical images to healthcare providers, clinicians, and patients.

The integrated layers of privacy and security controls in GCP are critical for healthcare companies such as Casa della Salute, especially those operating in Europe, following the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GPDR). “With features like encryption at rest, we can trust Google Cloud Platform with our customers’ information,” says Lorenzo. “Google Cloud Platform commitment to GDPR compliance is extremely important. Not all cloud service providers offer that, and it was one of the main reasons we chose Google Cloud Platform.”

O3 Enterprise is experimenting with Casa della Salute to leverage Google Cloud machine learning technologies such as TensorFlow in the future. For example, one goal of using machine learning is to improve the detection of masses and the classification of density in mammography images, leading to more accurate reporting.

  “We're proud to be able to provide the reports to our patients as soon as they're ready, thanks to the distribution via web and mobile apps, reducing their effort and saving them time. Moreover, we are growing very quickly and opening a new center on ZeeroMED running on Google Cloud is very fast and easy.”   —Omar Lafi, responsabile IT, Casa della Salute            

*Text originally published by Google at:https://cloud.google.com/customers/casa-della-salute/