Oftalmico switches to MACS.
In the city of Turin, in north-western Italy, Ospedale Oftalmico Sperino is a public hospital specialising in the treatment of eye diseases. The hospital is the Piedmont regional centre of expertise in paediatric ophthalmology, plastic and reconstructive ophthalmology, traumatology, glaucoma, and diseases of the cornea. It also houses the university ophthalmological clinic. The hospital has had a Telemis PACS system to serve the needs of its radiology department for several years, but more recently it wanted to extend its medical image archiving system to the other hospital's units.
What has this meant in practice?
Patient identity management is an important aspect of a MACS (Multimedia Archiving Communication System) installation: the information system and biomedical teams and Telemis Project Managers work together to extend the worklist concept to cover the whole hospital, beyond radiology.
The Telemis teams are working with the medical teams to conduct a complete inventory of non-radiology modalities and evaluate their connection capacities. This involves determining the priorities of each department and progressing towards an integrated operational system in every part of the hospital.
Aside from technical monitoring, training users to look up and send images will account for a significant proportion of the budget. User training will guarantee the highest possible satisfaction level thanks to the all-inclusive approach of the Telemis MACS: unlimited on-site training sessions and configurations is the best possible guarantee of the customer's ultimate satisfaction!
For what purpose?
Ospedale Oftalmico Sperino has several goals:
- To improve the quality of monitoring by providing an extended patient image archive to all departments in the hospital;
- To optimise and reuse the initial investment in the radiology department to serve the needs of the hospital's whole medical community and to favour the sharing of patient information;
- To contribute to scientific research thanks to the activation of knowledge-based database systems.
“With the installation of the MACS solution, Oftalmico hospital is moving towards a paperless environment in all departments. The initiative started with the installation of the PACS as the sole primary archive for radiology imaging. This networked solution offers a centralised repository for all documents and studies for every patient, and will provide more interaction between departments and increase the quality of clinical monitoring,” says Dr Sardi, Director of Oftalmico.