In theory, one of the greatest benefits of a cloud-based image-sharing service is its ability to transfer images quickly from one facility to another in an emergency situation.

With eMix, this benefit is no longer just hypothetical. A recent case involving a pair of facilities 2,000 miles apart shows that eMix can have life-saving clinical value when time is of the essence.

The emergency patient in this case was at Seattle Children's Hospital, an eMix user -- and by the way, ranked as one of the leading children's hospitals in the country by U.S. News & World Report. The patient's physicians needed multi-modality pediatric imaging studies that were archived at the University of Michigan Health System (UMHS). UMHS was not at that time an eMix customer.

To expedite the file transfer, Seattle Children's decided to keep all the arrangements within its own eMix account. It did this by adding a contact from UMHS as a user of the account. Within a couple of hours, the necessary imaging files were transferred to Seattle Children's.

Compare that to the 24-hours plus it probably would have taken to transfer files the pre-eMix way. That is, UMHS would have burned the files to CD, sent the CD by overnight delivery to Seattle Children's, and hoped the hospital could open and use the files as intended.

Consider also that most of the two hours involved in the eMix transfer was to address legal and other business issues involved in adding a UMHS staffer to its account. The actual electronic transfer took only minutes, as with most file-sharing via eMix. Had UMHS already been an eMix user, the whole transaction would have been accomplished with a few mouseclicks.

As the number of eMix users expands and fully converts to this reliable, simple-to-use technology, stories like the Seattle Children's/UMHS one will become commonplace -– and patient care will have taken a great leap forward.