Epic released Care Everywhere Diagnostic Image Exchange, letting health systems on its EHR directly share full diagnostic-quality CT, X-ray and MRI images with each other.
The release targets a persistent interoperability gap: diagnostic-quality images live in imaging archiving systems outside the EHR, and until now, health systems lacked an open standard for exchanging them. Epic said in an Aug. 13 news release that the gap has forced clinicians into manual image retrieval and left millions of patients carrying scans between appointments on CDs.
Diagnostic Image Exchange closes that gap by layering open image-exchange standards onto Epic’s existing Care Everywhere network, which for years has let organizations share written radiology reports and lower-resolution reference images. Clinicians used those reference images to identify which full-resolution scan they needed, then retrieved it manually; now they can pull it with one click.
Matt Doyle, Epic’s director of interoperability said Epic is the first vendor to adopt open image-sharing standards at scale and is pushing the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), the federally sponsored interoperability framework, to adopt the same standards so any U.S. health system can exchange diagnostic images, regardless of EHR vendor.
The upgrade also sharpens Epic’s duplicate-order checks, which already flag when a patient has had imaging done elsewhere and prevent more than 21,000 repeat scans a year; clinicians can now retrieve the flagged image directly rather than reordering the scan.
Diagnostic Image Exchange is available across the Epic community immediately.
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