Operating theatres are highly complex and costly hospital areas. The smoother everything runs, the better. Instant access – in emergency or planned cases – to the patient’s radiological examinations is vital, as is the seamless integration of images acquired during surgery.
If you look at the current – not to mention the future – challenges in the hospital environment the term information technology seems misleading. Surely there is no dearth of information. The foremost task of technology however is to turn information into knowledge. EH@Medica talked to Bernhard Calmer, Head of IT Sales, Siemens Healthcare, Germany, about the new knowledge technology and its…
Located in Vatican City in the heart of Rome, the Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù not only profits from a literally blessed base but also from an advanced IT-infrastructure in the radiology department. For over a year and a half, the largest children’s hospital in Italy has worked with the Carestream PACS, connecting the institution with two cooperating sites, one in Palidoro, one in St.…
The daily management of around 700 examinations within the national mammography screening programme keeps Dr Ilse Vejborg and her team at Rigshospitalet pretty busy. ‘We have the largest screening unit in Denmark with 200,000 women aged 50-69 years in the target group invited for an examination every second year,’ she explains.
It was not the sunshine of the Cote d’Azur in September that lured radiologists to picturesque Nice. Far more enticing was the stimulating programme offered by the Annual Scientific Meeting of Management in Radiology (MIR), which, for the first time, also included a Junior Radiologists Course.
Carestream upgrade and migrate PACS will now be installed across the country's 34 hospitals, replacing all hardware with new WinTel platforms configured with Carestream Vue PACS V11 software and new compression, storage and retention plans implemented on the National Archives.
Delivering software for the exchange of information, based on standards – this is the aim of TianiSPIRIT GmbH. The software specialist with headquarters in Austria emerged from the PACS manufacturer Tiani Medgraph AG; the dynamic team focuses on solutions for Health Information Exchange in compliance with the guidelines of the initiative “Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise” (IHE).
Carestream Health is one of the first healthcare IT providers to conduct pre-launch testing of the new Intel® Xeon® processor E7 product family in its industry-leading medical image management, archiving and distribution systems. These tests indicate the new high-performance processors can equip Carestream Health’s PACS and SuperPACS™ Architecture to deliver responsive access to a larger…
When thinking about sharing radiological data within a multi-site center or even within a region, the initial question that arises always sounds the same: How should we cross-link all the data from the existing PACS solutions without going bankrupt? Because drawing a line and installing new systems all over the site in most of the cases is simply not affordable. On the other hand, the…
Preliminary results from a large, ongoing study involving medical staff in 11 hospitals in six European countries indicate that Dell’s Mobile Clinical Computing (MCC) system has made the use of applications easier for doctors and nurses, significantly increased efficiency in IT management and raised IT acceptance in the hospitals involved.
To meet the high demands of today’s radiological environment, a PACS must provide far more than archiving, controlling and distribution of electronic data. Post processing and upgradable network structuring capabilities are just as important to guarantee efficient workflow. The Visage Thin Client looks like a smart solution indeed.
A mix of hardware, software and services, the Hitachi Clinical Repository (HCR) system draws together all patient data from many information sources, thus providing quicker and better use of records. At Hitachi Data Systems, Mark Clark explained: ‘HCR basically provides the infrastructure to put together both clinical and non-clinical data into a centralised, non-proprietary-repository to…
The global software provider TeraRecon is recognised for strong clinical applications containing advanced image processing and 3-D visualisation for CT, MRI and PET. Since May 2010, this Silicon Valley company (Frost & Sullivan’s 2010 ‘Company of the Year Award’ winner, for European Advanced Visualisation Applications) has been expanding its core business into cloud computing services…
SECure TRAnsmission, the main aim of a spin-off from the Linköping Institute of Technology, was established in 1978. From this beginning, the Swedish firm Sectra has evolved into one of the world’s leading players in PACS and mammography solutions. Although secure communication systems remains a core business, the medical section has constantly grown since 1988, when Dr Torbjörn Kronander…
With over 6,000 employees serving over 50 different departments, the 1,062-bed university hospital UZ Gent is Belgium’s largest single hospital campus. Managing all the imaging data from such a huge institution – as well as establishing a network with about 30 partner hospitals and other caregivers – suggests a quite tricky task. Tricky, but not impossible, as Professor Bart Sijnave, Chief…
IMPAX 6.5 was one of the key solutions the company focused on at RSNA 2010, held in Chicago from November 28th to December 2nd. IMPAX is a sixth-generation integrated RIS/PACS workflow solution for data management and reporting, offering improved productivity through its automated worklists, advanced volumetric study management systems and ability to be deployed across and beyond the hospital…
The United Kingdom’s diagnostic imaging departments are not only dealing with an increasing workload of over 10% per annum but also with the growing sophistication of MR and CT scanners. They need and are looking for solutions to deal with an almost exponential data explosion. This daily overload has to be managed in telemedicine network data sharing environments as well as in long-term…
How does a hospital decide what to do about in-house radiology if, for example, its consultant retires? Select a ‘new broom’ to brush out earlier practices, or make this an opportunity to redefine its radiology department’s services and objectives? In the latter case, outsourcing to receive diagnoses from an external radiologist might be potentially interesting. However, Dr Winfried…
He was among the pioneers of hospital digitization. Way back in 1988, Professor Walter Hruby, Chair of the Institute for Radiological Diagnostics at the Donauspital Vienna, in Austria, decided that, when his hospital opened its doors, state-of-the-art technology would be implemented. Thus, in 1992, the Donauspital became Europe’s first, fully-digitised hospital. Today, recollecting that…
In the historical city of Gouda, in the Netherlands, the 441-bed Groene Hart Ziekenhuis (Green Heart Medical Centre) employs about 150 doctors and serves a local population of 450,000 people. Last September it became the first hospital in Europe to install the new Carestream Cardiology PACS. Launched in 2009, the PACS provides a single integrated platform for diagnosis, reporting, storage and…
The VISUS system integrates cardiology modalities from all major manufacturers. Due to the company’s long experience with the communication standard DICOM, which is the corner stone of the integration of images in the PACS, images which are not available in DICOM format are digitalised with the help of a frame grabber, basically an analogue-digital converter.
Here’s a scenario: A bug has entered the system. Nobody knows how and what it is. What is clear is that, due to the problem with the imaging plate readout, the X-ray examination just carried out must be repeated. Who, in the hospital, is ultimately responsible for this situation?
Given the task of archiving today’s huge data files, not to mention additional services demanded of hospital IT staff, cloud computing could reduce many headaches. Via a healthcare IT supplier that offers cloud computing, a hospital would be able to use, over the Web, virtual hardware that provides higher levels of storage capacity and computing resources.
L’Assitance Publique Hôpitaux de Paris, France, is one of the largest of its kind in Europe. In 2005, the group voted to implement a PACS in association with Carestream Health to connect its 47 hospitals and centralise their data. This meant creating a network to cover 36 CT scanners, 31 MRIs, seven PET-CTs and 37 SPECT systems, which were linked to 37 RIS and 30,000 computers - of course…
Initiated by Professor Peter Mildenberger and organised by European Hospital, the second PACS and more seminar, held during the DICOM meeting in Mainz, Germany, more than matched its name. Report: Meike Lerner