Belgium’s largest single site hospital has started implementing the first hospital-wide picture archiving and communications system in the country.
UZ Gent will use Carestream Health’s PACS to engage all departments across the hospital in a single, image-enabled archive system.
The hospital, which has 1,062 beds and is networked to 12 other hospitals, wanted the ability to store multimedia images.
It also wanted a hospital-wide system that consolidated its software and allowed every caregiver to share information using a vendor-independent platform.
Professor Bart Sijnave, chief information officer at UZ Gent, said: “Like many global healthcare providers, our push is to reduce the duration of stays.
"[We want to do this by] increasing the focus on the chain of information, ensuring that patient care is enhanced through good communication, and that the appropriate level of care provided by the right professional.”
Carestream Health’s PACS provides a data workflow engine that will connect 40 different departments to one clinical archive.
According to the company, this will simplify IT administrative functions and reduce cost, delivering a multi-tier repository for industry-standard data such as XDS, XDS-1, DICOM, HL7 as well as other non-DICOM objects.
The hospital has already trialed the PACS in five pilot departments, providing a single access point to clinical images and other stored clinical information, including images, video clips, laboratory results and biopsy results.
Professor Sijnave added: “We’ve worked with PACS in radiology for the last five years, and now there is no film used anywhere in the hospital – even surgery is completed using digital imaging.”
He added: “Patient care will increasingly involve a multi-disciplinary approach, with teams working together to provide the most comprehensive care package possible.
"The theory sounds easy, but in practice it has traditionally broken down due to poor information exchange, particularly with the sharing of patient records.”
Link: Carestream Health