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…
Founded in 1981, IT solutions provider cobixx is a highly successful WLAN solutions innovator, an expertise now recognised by Cisco, a world leader in internet network solutions. Cisco’s Advanced Specialised Partner status is awarded solely to providers with a proven track record of competence in design, construction and maintenance of unified wireless LAN solutions. Denise Hennig reports
Given that European countries have very diverse healthcare systems with special types of hospitals and even special information systems, comparison of healthcare systems and hospital performances is difficult. Thus, the first HIMSS Europe Leadership IT Summit, which took place in Rome, has provided a platform from which to discuss quality patient care based on IT and particularly the…
At a meeting hosted by Siemens at AACC 2010, an expert panel shared perspectives on IT in the clinical lab. Representatives from Henry Ford Hospital (Detroit, MI), Alegent Health (Omaha, NE) and Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Centre (Baltimore, MD) spoke about the increasing importance of IT in helping today’s lab to meet the challenges of cost containment, quality of care, increasing workload,…
The accuracy and reliability of medical laboratory examination results are vital part in healthcare delivery, and these plus the effective operation of laboratories are the main goals of laboratory managers. To ensure a high quality operation, medical laboratories have quality management systems and, through laboratory accreditation, show their competence.
After years of go-slow adoption and cautious optimism, European cardiologists are now embracing remote monitoring of cardiac electrophysiology devices. ‘We are at the dawn of a new era,’ concluded Dr Philippe Ritter, Chairman of the Cardiostim 2010 congress, after reviewing findings of studies that delivered unequivocal evidence that remote monitoring is not only a safe alternative to clinic…
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.
A study* to assess the usability of hospital IT in Germany by focusing on effectiveness (functionality), efficiency (software ergonomics) and application support, has been published by the German association of manufacturers of healthcare IT solutions (Verband der Hersteller von IT-Lösungen im Gesundheitswesen – VHITG).
The Health Informatics Congress held in the UK this April, revealed how IT is helping health Trusts across the UK to take innovative steps in the way they respond to patients’ needs. The Clinical Showcase session examined how Trusts are coping with new patient administration and reporting systems and, in particular, how Cerner Millennium and Lorenzo systems are being implemented.
In April, the Asklepios Future Hospital (AFH) Programme, a multinational cooperation of 25 business partners, gained a new partner, Prof. Rupert Gerzer, Director of the German Aerospace Centre, an expert in distance medical services. In a partnership begun over five years ago with Microsoft and Intel, Asklepios designed the AHF to develop special hospital and entire healthcare system information…
The hosting service has been selected, software standards have been published, and on 11 December 2010 any French citizen will be able to open a file and begin creating a secure, personal electronic health record (EHR). If the agency charged with this ambitious programme meets the deadline, France will suddenly jump to the leading edge of e-health worldwide, rivalling advanced national programmes…
The introduction of electronic patient records (EPRs) can ‘dramatically’ speed up the Chlamydia treatment cycle, more than doubling the number of people treated within two weeks of a test result, according to research led by Dr Gary Brook at the Patrick Clements Clinic, Central Middlesex Hospital, London, and published in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections.
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
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…
A telemedicine network project currently being implemented in the Leipzig region has won Australian IT firm iSOFT the top award in the 5th Ideenpark Gesundheitswirtschaft (Idea-park Healthcare) competition, presented by the Financial Times Deutschland at its annual FTD-Health Conference in Berlin. The awards are given for projects that contribute to greater transparency, productivity and…
Seven hospitals in the Tyrol region are now online with an IHE cross-enterprise document sharing (XDS) network centred at Insnsburch University Hospital. About 4,000 patient discharge letters are exchanged daily and 4,000 queries managed.
With four hospitals, each with its own radiology department, and the central Institute of Radiology located at Höxter the Catholic Hospital Association (KHWE) Weser-Egge, Germany, needed communication improvements.
The volcanic ash creating widespread no-fly zones had no significant impact on the success of conhIT, Germany’s largest healthcare IT event; for three days in April some 3,500 experts were there to discuss current trends in their field and visit the IT trade fair to assess new solutions and products. One topic central to this year’s event was the convergence of IT and medical technology,…
"The problem between information technology and medical engineering may stem from sequential processing and intermeshing", Peter Gocke, MD, said. Sounds difficult? But the real difficulty in the “Cooperation between IT and Medical Engineering (ME)” is something seemingly mundane: “At the end of the day collaboration is the target achievable”, Gocke, who is IT director at the University…
The key to implementing PACS installations networked to multiple hospitals is fully to establish in advance exactly what clinical scenario needs to be satisfied. In her lecture, Dr Nicola H Strickland BM BCh, at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, UK, spoke about the several possibilities, as well as the requirement and challenges which have to be considered in each scenario.
iSOFT Group Limited, Australia's largest listed health information technology company, today announced that St Jansdal Hospital in the Netherlands extended its contract for iSOFT’s Lorenzo solution for a further three years, in a deal worth €4.5 million.