How OCINet and GE HealthCare are transforming healthcare
The world of healthcare is experiencing a rapid transformation. As organisations look to embrace digital tools, the possibilities are endless: from enabling care closer to home to reducing costs and decreasing patient wait times.
Formed in April 2022 with the consolidation of three diagnostic imaging repository programmes, the Ontario Clinical Imaging Network (OCINet) was created to execute Ontario’s medical imaging digital health strategy.
Building on efforts from the past decade, OCINet enables the secure storage and retrieval of image records, supports hospitals and independent health facilities (IHFs), and connects radiologists, referring physicians, and specialists with their patients’ images province-wide.
“In the early 2000s, there was an organisation in Canada called Canada Health Infoway which had the mandate to digitise healthcare and bring value through technology,” explains Shafique Shamji, OCINet’s President and CEO. “They created a blueprint of how to digitise healthcare in the next century. Imaging was a large part of this, largely because imaging tends to be a leader in digitisation and technology and innovation in general within the healthcare space.”
As Shamji describes, one of the recommendations for imaging from that blueprint was to centralise images and make them available regionally. “The Ontario government took that to heart, and in 2010 started the first of four repositories in Ontario.”
All of this process was around increasing speed in the imaging process, ultimately providing a better experience for patients.
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