Integrating medical images into hospital information systems

Abstract

The effective delivery of health cara has become increasingly dependent on a wide range of medical data that includes a variety of images. Manual and computer-based medical records ordinarily do not contain image data, leaving the physician to deal with a fragmanted patient record widely scattered throughout the hospital. The Department of Veterans Affairs is currently installing a prototype hospital information system workstation network to demonstrate the feasibility of providing image management and communications functionality as ah integral part of an existing hospital information system. The core of this system is a data base management system adapted to handle images as a new data type. A general modal for this network-based integration is discussed and various alternative architectures are examined. This is a US government work. There are no restrictions on its use.KEY WORDS: image management, hospital information system, HIS, image integration, data type, multimedia data base management system, automated clinical record.

Medical Images in Integrated Health Care Workstations

“…Special-purpose medical imaging workstations overcome the drawbacks of general purpose tools. Many medical imaging workstations have been developed in the past [38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45]. They are typically based on PCs or UNIX workstations.…”

“…Integrated clinical workstations are oriented toward a complete view of patient data, at the same time allowing consulting physicians to have access to the full range of data. An example of such a system is the DHCP imaging system which has been developed at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington D.C. [44][45][46]. A discussion of different ways to integrate medical images into hospital information systems can be found in [44].…”

“…An example of such a system is the DHCP imaging system which has been developed at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington D.C. [44][45][46]. A discussion of different ways to integrate medical images into hospital information systems can be found in [44].…”

A Foundation for Enterprise Imaging: HIMSS-SIIM Collaborative White Paper

“…As EHRs were installed, enterprises learned that many care groups had similarly isolated and fragmented approaches to image management [ 3 ]. Enterprises also learned that many specialties had similar image capture, image storage, and image distribution unmet needs [ 4 – 6 ].…”

Integrating Patient Digital Photographs with Medical Imaging Examinations

“…At the same time, memory costs have continued to drop and the addition of digital photographic data to an imaging study has negligible cost associated with it when compared with the overall cost of the study.For more than two decades, the development of the digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) standard has allowed for integrating imaging data from various modalities into hospital information systems [11, 14] and has provided the ability to present integrated image data to radiologists and other physicians [10]. Thus, the technical foundation exists, making our novel concept a feasible one.…”