DRH Health serves rural hospitals and specialty clinics across multiple counties in Oklahoma, focusing on quality healthcare to underserved patient populations that often must travel far for treatment. Managing health data across dozens of sites--dispersed hospitals and clinics--was increasingly challenging. System outages and inefficient workflows often disrupted access to diagnostic patient priors, hampered clinical decision-making and delayed patient care. Connectivity gaps also impacted collaboration between care teams and locations, which compromised the patient experience.
Fixing this and providing the experience that physicians required and patients deserved called for a new approach: building a connected, reliable, and efficient enterprise imaging ecosystem.
DRH Health’s imaging environment previously included inactive contingency servers and under-utilized image-sharing capabilities. These were meant to support quick access to diagnostic images and patient priors for radiologists and clinicians, but instead were increasing the risk for workflow delays, diagnostic errors, and compromised care. The team at DRH Health saw the need for more secure interoperability and robust collaboration to help them offer more consistent patient experiences and clinical outcomes across its network.
That’s why DRH Health turned to Merge for its cloud-based enterprise imaging platform, Merge Imaging Suite. This modular, scalable solution includes Merge VNA, Merge Universal Viewer with Cloud QC, and Merge Workflow Orchestrator. As an integrated platform, Merge Imaging Suite centralizes hospital imaging data, provides a zero-footprint diagnostic viewer, and uses workflow orchestration to create a unified worklist that expands control over caseloads. Now, radiologists, clinicians, and physicians can collaborate more reliably with a secure, unified environment to access patient priors and diagnostic content.
To get here, clinical and IT leadership at DRH Health collaborated with end users to systematically target pain points and align workflows with practical requirements. This allowed them to standardize workflows, integrate data between hospitals, and enhance communication for better outcomes and efficiency.
DRH Health’s experience highlights that enterprise imaging success is anchored in systematic alignment between hospital staff, technology access, and clinical workflow needs. By prioritizing controlled access to patient priors, secure collaboration, and customizable worklists, the implementation of Merge Imaging Suite was a success. Why was this implementation such a success?
Optimizing enterprise imaging requires more than new technology: it calls for strategic process alignment, team collaboration, and streamlined workflows that connect clinical needs with their day-to-day systems and processes. DRH Health’s transformation — from fragmented operations to unified medical imaging workflows — offers a repeatable blueprint. Learn more about DRH Health as a leading example among rural hospitals that are embracing technology to address their needs today and be prepared for the future.