Carestream Health is to provide technical infrastructure to a European Union project that aims to create an Ebay-style online market for radiology services.
Called R-Bay, the e-TEN project will test the concept and technical components needed create an online marketplace for e-radiology services.
The project has eleven partners from eight European countries. Services will be tested in six field trials each consisting of a customer and a clinical provider.
Four main radiology services will be tested: e-interpretation, e-processing, e-archiving and e-training.
The R-Bay project is intended to provide the foundations for the creation of a unique internal online marketplace for e-health services in Europe that will act as a cross border commodity brokering and exchange place. If it proves a success R-bay should enable the sale and purchase of remote viewing, consulting and second opinion radiology services across the EU.
Using the online market healthcare providers will become able to access radiology expertise, resources and services from radiology professionals across the continent. It is hoped that by creating a readily accessible marketplace for radiology diagnostic services R-Bay will help address the uneven spread of radiologists across EU member states.
The online marketplace to be built will enable the sale and purchase of remote viewing, consulting and second opinion services across organisations, regions and countries, enabling pan-European distribution of radiologist resources across trusted and secure networks.
Carestream will provide the Radiology Information Management Solution (RIS) to be used in the project’s test platform. This test phase will focus on enabling the remote reporting of images from hospitals in Denmark, Finland and Czech Republic by clinical providers in Estonia, Lithuania and the Netherlands.
“Carestream Health has wide experience in system integration and the interoperability issues associated with implementing national and regional solutions, such as the Scotland National RIS/PACS projects, Baltic e-Health project and Uppsala region of Sweden, ” said Ulf Andersson, marketing director for Carestream Health Northern Europe.
He added that as part of the R-Bay project, these Carestream’s imformation management solutions will help to better distribute radiologist resources and give European patients to access pan-European imaging services.
As part of the pilot phase Carestream Heath will work closely with Finnish IT provider Mawell, who are responsible for providing the central eConsultation workflow portal.
Four core services will be offered under the consultation portal – eInterpretation, eProcessing, eArchiving and eTraining. To deliver these four services Carestream’s thin-client architecture is being scaled to create a “virtual cross border community”.
R-Bay will also offer optional integrated applications such as image fusion and orthopedic surgical templating in addition to native 3-D imaging and advanced cardiac features, using the latest version of Kodak Carestream PACS.
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