Case Study...
On-call: Simple and fast Internet access to out-of-hours Radiology
Every hospital needs access to specialist clinical opinion for patients after 5;00 PM. Patient episodes may require sub-specialty involvement at any time of day or night. East and North Herts NHS Trust and West Herts Hospitals Trust connect numerous hospital sites through two PACS systems, and out-of-hours diagnostic cover is provided by their On-Call specialists from home. Having tried direct web-viewer access to PACS, image acquisition was too slow and made MR and CT rendering time consuming and laborious. Cimar's Cranium On-Call routing service was implemented, which connects directly to PACS, and routes all images produced out-of-hours, directly to a secure remote web-worklist. From here, specialists at home can select which images they need to see quickly and download them for fast rendering and review. Not all images produced over night need their opinion of course. But that's the point - if an image is needed, its there when needed and the complete automation of the service means no one needs to search for, retrieve, and push images, ever. The next morning, the Cimar service automatically deletes all images, wiping the slate clean for the next days use. And of course downloaded images are erased from users PC's when their session closes...
The key to this seamless automated routing, is Cimar's DO Router and rules engine. Automatically switching on at 5:00 PM, it copies any new studies produced during the night, compresses, encrypts and transmit to the correct users web-worklist. It takes a minute or so from the time of a scan being taken, to its availability on the web for remote access in a full function DICOM viewer...
- Secure and fast remote access to out of hours Emergency episode images
- Radiologist or consultant can be located anywhere in the UK
- Faster on-call clinical decisions and better patient care
Cimar's On-Call solutions currently route approximately 1,000,000 images per month for users of this indispensable and cost saving service.
Case Studies
Cimar's technology and services are in use across the NHS, in Private healthcare and internationally. Here are a few scenario briefs that help illustrate the divers uses of Cimar's Cranium-web service:
