M7T, MGH collaborate to implement Keystone Engine for radiology workflow scenario

Mach 7 Technologies (M7T), a global provider of vendor neutral medical image management solutions, has collaborated with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to implement Keystone Engine to improve a highly specialized radiology department workflow scenario.  

After viewing the capability of Keystone Engine, MGH identified a use-case involving a highly complex, high volume study distribution workflow improvement scenario.  "It was very important that we find a market leading PACS vendor neutral solution that could resolve highly specialized study routing challenges without causing additional delays in distributing studies," states Tom Schultz, Chief Engineer of Partners Healthcare Enterprise Medical Imaging (EMI) Laboratory.

Prior to deploying Keystone Engine, the MGH radiology PACS was "double sending" studies to two server environments used for enterprise study viewing. This consumed diminishing PACS CPU resource, and certain studies resulted in end-user errors due to incompatibilities between the PACS and the enterprise viewer system.  In the new workflow, Keystone Engine has been inserted between the PACS and the dual server environments.  The PACS sends all studies once to Keystone Engine, which in turn routs each study to both server environments, thereby reducing PACS study sending overhead by 50% and improving overall PACS performance.  In addition, the studies that cause end-user errors are filtered out by Keystone Engine customer defined rules.  Keystone Engine speed is fast.  Even with the insertion of Keystone Engine into the study distribution workflow and enabling specific filter processing, the overall time to distribute studies to the enterprise viewing servers is faster than the previous solution due to the reduced workload on the primary PACS.

"Keystone Engine enables us to take greater ownership of imaging data and significantly enhances our ability to share that data towards improving patient care," notes Dr. Keith Dreyer, Vice Chairman of Radiology Informatics at MGH.  "We are keenly interested in working with new, path-breaking technologies such as the Keystone Suite that help break the bonds of vendor proprietary solutions.  Imaging IT solutions like Keystone Suite are the key to a customer managed, image-enabled healthcare enterprise."

In a related development, Mach 7 Technologies has signed a cooperative agreement with EMI.  Under this agreement, the EMI laboratory is used to perform extensive evaluation and performance testing of new Keystone Suite software releases.

"The addition of the world-renowned Massachusetts General Hospital to our growing customer base and the cooperative relationship with EMI further establishes Mach 7 Technologies as a rapidly-emerging provider of advanced PACS vendor neutral solutions," says Tom Riesenberg, COO at Mach 7 Technologies. "We look forward to continued collaboration with the EMI team to strengthen Keystone Suite as a leading edge vendor neutral medical imaging solution."