Cloud PACS enables CIRA to continue patient care after cyberattack

Central Illinois Radiological Associates (CIRA) is a large, physician-owned radiology practice serving hospital customers from the Midwest. It employs more than 100 radiologists across a range of specialties to enable and enhance their customers radiology programs.

One of CIRA’s customers, a large hospital system in the Midwest, was experiencing an extended systemwide downtime of all IT services. EMR, PACS, Reporting and network were all down. As a result, radiologists were required to be on site to view images on modalities and handwrite preliminary reports to keep critical care in place. Patient care was severely impacted, so a solution that would allow for safe image storage and electronic documentation was needed.

CIRA has been an Optum development partner for many years, including assisting in the development of Stratus Imaging PACS, a cloud-native, highly secure PACS. CIRA’s decision to partner with Optum rested on recognition that a cloud-native approach would eliminate costly hardware, virtual machine (VM) resources, disaster recovery costs, maintenance and support. The Optum approach to upgrades, enabled by cloud-native architecture, meant CIRA would always be on the latest released version. The minimal installation and maintenance efforts required from the IT department were also beneficial.

“As would be expected as development partners, we were aware of the capabilities of the system from an implementation, usability and feature set perspective. This is a full-featured cloud PACS that was easy to set up to allow continued clinical care for our customer impacted by a cyber event,” said CIRA director of Clinical Applications and Informatics.

CIRA brought the system online for their impacted customer in a few days and partnered with Optum to rapidly develop and deploy an order management system tailored to the customer’s immediate needs. The Stratus Imaging PACS security controls took pressure off the CIRA customer teams working to resolve the cyber incident.

“Having this system in place has allowed us to provide a cloud-native solution to our hospital partners that is fast, easy to implement, robust and feature-rich,” said CIRA director of Clinical Applications and Informatics. “It requires minimal setup and configuration, and critically in this situation, also requires no additional hardware support.”

Post-implementation training was quick. A single radiologist with experience with the system gave a brief, 30-minute training session and the radiologists were off and running with minimal assistance. There were some hurdles to cross since internet connectivity wasn’t available at the sites, so 5G hotspots and wireless network cards in the reading workstations were leveraged. Once connectivity was established, the remaining technical implementation was minimal.

Because of the quick adoption and ease of use, physicians were able to read approximately 7,000 exams electronically and keep patient care operational in a time of crisis. This was something that couldn’t be achieved by handwriting reports and walking to modalities. Cloud-native Stratus Imaging PACS allowed CIRA’s customer to securely continue to deliver care amid an ongoing IT emergency.