Tackling Medicolegal Concerns in PACS | Ownership of Medical Images

The recording for RadSite’s webinar, Tackling Medicolegal Concerns in PACS – Part 1, is now available. In this one-hour session, Eliot Siegel, MD, RadSite’s Chief Technology Officer, discusses legalities in health care pertaining to ownership of medical images, how to deal with bankruptcy in an imaging facility and why physicians don’t use image compression more often. To access the recording directly, click here.

Dr. Eliot Siegel is an internationally recognized radiologist who serves as professor and vice chair at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Department of Diagnostic Radiology, as well as chief of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine for the Veterans Affairs Maryland Healthcare System, both in Baltimore, MD. Dr. Siegel oversees and promotes the integrity of all technical and quality-based programs as well as the research initiatives of RadSite. He also provides guidance for RadSite’s accreditation programs and internal quality improvement initiatives. Dr. Siegel has written over 200 articles and book chapters about PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication Systems) and digital imaging and has edited six books on the topic, including Filmless Radiology and Security Issues in the Digital Medical Enterprise. He has presented more than 1,000 times worldwide on a broad range of topics involving the use of computers in medicine. He has been named Researcher of the Year, Educator of the Year, and received multiple awards for innovation, including the Smithsonian Award.

In this webinar, you can expect to learn:

The law surrounding questions of ownership of diagnostic images and provides in-depth answers to questions such as:
- Who actually owns diagnostic images – the patient or the facility who created the images? Do they co-own the images?
- How far do patient rights extend to their images?
- Can images be used without patients’ permission?
The issue of records retention requirements, including:
- Who is responsible for storing images, the facility who created them or the facility who requests copies?
- If a facility does not store images and cannot find an image that would act as evidence in a malpractice suit, how does the jury look at that lack of evidence?
- What happens to images if a facility goes bankrupt?
The use of compression and the ACR’s stance on compression
- Why compress images?
- Does compression reduce the quality of diagnostic images?
- What are the standards surrounding compression?
- Are we being too conservative in our approach to compression?
Hear Dr. Siegel’s answers to attendees’ questions such as:

Who in health care system should take primary responsibility for educating the general public about who owns images?
In cases where patients are transferred between sites, is it better for all providers to store copies of the images, or is it acceptable to follow ACR guidelines and not keep the images at the receiving facility if they are already being stored at the transmitting site?
I have a patient who had X-rays at another facility, but the other facility is saying they will not provide copies of the X-rays. Is this illegal?
If images are lost in PAC system, what are the legal implications for site and vendor?

Registration open for upcoming webinar

RadSite will host the second half of this informative presentation featuring Dr. Siegel on February 3, 2016, at 12 p.m. ET. The session, Tackling Medicolegal Concerns in PACS – Part 2, will focus on whether or not to retain the markings produced by mammography computer-aided detection (CAD) software to highlight suspicious findings, which could have important medicolegal implications. To register, please contact us.