Cloud Based Medical Image Sharing Between Ethiopia and Alabama

Opened in 2005, Soddo Christian Hospital is a 130-bed, full-service facility serving Wolayita – a lush agricultural region in southern Ethiopia where corn, wheat, barley and other flora are harvested for export. While geographically stunning, Wolayita is one of Ethiopia’s more populated and impoverished regions within a country already considered one of the world’s poorest. This causes many to seek opportunity in the cities, making it difficult for Soddo Christian Hospital (and all healthcare providers in this area) to attract and retain qualified support. Rural Ethiopia also means supply chain issues, power outages, and limited systems support.

As difficult as this sounds, the Ethiopian healthcare system has successfully adapted to scarcity by allocating what they have. To wit, life expectancy has surged from 56.24 to 64.04 over the last

decade (Source: countryeconomy.com), has a soaring population, and has a dramatically reduced infant mortality rate!

Regarding radiology, Soddo Christian Hospital boasts the only CT scanner in the entire southern half of Ethiopia, creating a massive and on-going reliance for scans and interpretation. Unfortunately, its lone part-time radiologist could not manage the full-time patient load, which led to an agreement with the University of Alabama to help with offsite reads. Soddo Christian Hospital first tried Dropbox, but the process was extremely cumbersome. Installing a remote DICOM archive through a VPN eliminated the security issue, but the burden on techs remained. Plus, network errors, timeouts, overloads, and bandwidth problems remained. Bottom line, it was slow, finicky, and extremely unreliable.

 

Solution

RadConnect, the cloud-based medical image-sharing SaaS solution developed by NucleusHealth, makes collaboration easier for everyone – physicians, technicians, administrators, and patients. When supporting technology is fast, secure, accurate, accessible, robust, and simple to use, all involved are better prepared to provide and receive outstanding care.

For Soddo Christian Hospital, RadConnect represented a cost-effective way to do more reads. Leveraging its long-standing relationship

with US-trained, Board-Certified radiologists at UAB, RadConnect’s web-based technology simply plugged into both systems using their browsers and web-enabled devices. Rather than patching into complex, often incompatible legacy systems, Soddo Christian Hospital now sends and receives their diagnostic imaging files and reports at the touch of a button. Offsite reads are now dependable and streamlined.

 

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