Health Imaging & IT - February 2008 - (Page 44)

technology uPDate By Sarah Lamberti Increasing functionality FirstHealth of the Carolinas, a network of three North Carolina hospitals, including Moore Regional, Montgomery Hospital and Richmond Memorial, and 15 primary-care facilities, has seen significant cost-savings since switching from film to CDs for patient and physician image distribution. The health system uses the PacsCube CD/DVD burner system from DatCard to keep up with the 210,000 imaging procedures done each year across the network. On average, the FirstHealth processes 23 studies per day at a cost of roughly $10, says David Quinlan, PACS administrator for the health system. That’s a significant savings compared to the $162 it would cost for film to reproduce the same number of studies, says Quinlan. “We have seen significant cost-savings and time savings—we can do something else while waiting for a CD to burn.” PacsCube takes DICOM images and studies and records them onto CD/DVD, embedding a lite DICOM viewing tool so images can be viewed from any Windows-based PC. Discs are then labeled with patient and study demographics, facility logo and an audit trail identifier, says Quinlan. With PacsCube, the hospital has gained more functionality, he says, and can now span CDs for large studies. “Every CD burner has different functionalities and one of the biggest drivers for us is to be able to burn images from a 64-slice CT,” he says. “We are now able to span CDs to accommodate full data sets and can split at the series level or the study level.” Quinlan says it is a manual decision by the end user to use a CD or DVD. PacsCube supports 700MB CD-R and 4.7GB DVD-R. The automatic labeling that PacsCube provides is another functional benefit for the network. “Every CD has the patient name and study taken from the PACS and burned directly onto the disc—the less a person touches it, the less chance for error there is. It is very much a simple solution that is quite effective,” says Quinlan. CD/DVD Burners Burn, Baby, Burn CD and DVD burners are now ubiquitous in the medical imaging market and CDs have become a de facto solution to archiving and distributing medical images for patients and physicians across multiple specialties and modalities. Three facilities share the benefits. Driving quality “It about quality, not retention,” says Jeff Broz, operations director of Imaging Appli44 Health Imaging & IT | February 2008 HealthImaging.com http://HealthImaging.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Health Imaging & IT - February 2008

Health Imaging & IT - February 2008 Contents On the Web The Enterprise News Update Cover Story: Enterprise Image Management Makes the Grade Modality Update Special Section: Health IT: Image Management Special Section: Health IT: PCs on the Move Convention Spotlight Technology Outlook Technology Update Reader's Resource Stat Sheet

Health Imaging & IT - February 2008

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