Health Imaging & IT - October 2008 - (Page 31)

rise as the hospital this month opens its new 100,000-square-foot Bush/Renner facility, also located in Richardson. “With Bush/Renner, we will add another component to our configuration that will allow us to add those procedures to our current eRAD PACS,” says PACS Administrator Lan Brockington. “The benefit to this is all our radiologists can dictate exams at one location instead of having to be physically located at the Bush/Renner site: essentially bringing the images to them.” The other benefit is the uniformity in understanding and practice among all users. “There is only eRAD system that users, doctors or referring physicians need to view images performed at both locations, eliminating the challenge of remembering multiple user IDs and passwords that would come from separate PACS. Plus, with eRAD being web-based, the application can be opened from any location with internet access when the network security is authenticated,” she says. The remote access is particularly helpful for the opening of new facilities. “As we open up new hospitals, it is easy to add them to our current configuration since there is no previous history of procedures performed,” Brockington notes. Data migration, however, is a potential barrier to expanding with a single PACS. “When new hospitals or imaging facilities are acquired, how can the new data migrate into the current PACS configuration,” she questions. “Such as the patient who has been to both facilities but has been assigned different medical record numbers. How can the system recognize that the patient procedures belong to the same patient or a patient with a similar name?” Another benefit of enterprise PACS access is the speed with which a referring physician can obtain the information he or she needs to treat a patient more quickly. “About two years ago, our radiologists began entering preliminary reports into PACS. Those reports are available within minutes for the emergency department physician, who can pull up the study through the Meditech Healthimaging.com EMR. As a result, the patient can be treated within minutes,” Greater Baltimore Medical Center’s Bodyk says. Greater Baltimore also has installed PACS workstations in each of the critical care units. “By the time a portable chest x-ray is completed, the image can be processed on the Fujifilm station in the unit, it can be processed and available for the physician within two or three minutes of acquiring the image.” october 2008 | Health Imaging & IT 31 http://www.dejarnette.com http://www.dejarnette.com http://www.HealthImaging.com

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Health Imaging & IT - October 2008 Contents The Enterprise News Update Top Trends in Health Imaging & IT - Topping the Competition Advances in Cardiac CT & MRI CVIS Spurs Innovation Technology Outlook People & Technology In Practice Reader's Resource

Health Imaging & IT - October 2008

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