Kay Siercks, Head of IT

The PACS developments of the past few years have been primarily focused on the needs of radiology or radiological imaging. In this regard digital diagnosing and archiving are of primary importance; these will be amortized through the reduction of film costs. From the very beginning, Augusta Hospital Bochum together with VISUS Co. has been innovative and also has included the imaging procedures of other departments in the PACS concept.

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Col. Dr. Aysha Mubarak Jaber, Chief of Radiology Department

Capt. Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad Alkhalifa, Head of Information Technology

At BDFRMS, the discussion had shifted from "Do we need a PACS?" to whether to go for a department or modality oriented system or instead for a hospital-wide solution. Approaches differed widely, with issues reaching far beyond simple cost matters. The decision was taken in favor of JiveX Enterprise PACS, fundamentally changing the paradigm of work in radiology.

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M. Willmann, M.Sc.

The Sana Clinic in Remscheid is a hospital focusing on specialized care with 16 departments and 684 planned beds. In 2005 it was newly constructed as a result of combining two locations. "The new facility provided the opportunity to improve the organization of procedures and, thereby, to work more economically. That requires rapid and lean processes", explains Michael Willmann, M.Sc. Head of Information Technology Department. A significant part of the comprehensive IT strategy required to accomplish this objective is the digitalization of radiology.

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MD Christoph Labisch, Private Radiology Herne
Andreas Jacoby, Ev. Hospital group Herne 

In radiological diagnostics it becomes more and more important to provide findings in real time to image acquisistion - not only in the hospital but also in the doctors´ practice where the patient is waiting for his/her radiographs and findings to bring to his/her GP. In a film-based radiology the doctor has to make a decision: he is either giving the patient the radiographs to take with them and later on has to duplicate the scans to provide findings which leads to higher costs. Or he finds the scans right afterwards which leads to longer waiting times for patients.

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Dr. Frank Stöblen 

It is no longer possible to manage a radiology unit economically without a PACS. Such a system is indispensable with regard to organizing effective work processes and ensuring high quality diagnostics in particular - especially when providing services to mammography screening units in parallel. This is exactly the situation at the radiology group practice of Dr. Krüger, Dr. Stöblen, Dr. Baschour, PD Dr. Eising and Ms. Stelkens-Gebhardt. In order to keep costs transparent and budgetable, the radiologists decided that rather than buying a PACS solution, they would task VISUS with operating it for them.

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Reinhard Harweg, IT Manager 

The Asklepios Clinics at Weissenfels and Hohenmölsen acquired a PACS in a roundabout way, as IT manager Reinhard Harweg ex-plains: "We wanted to become a certified breast center in Saxony. In order to meet the strict requirements in terms of documentation and archiving a hospital information system (HIS) on its own is inadequate. We also wanted the newly purchased digital mammography system to enable us to launch comprehensive digitization of Radiology. A PACS was installed at an early stage in order to enable archiving and smooth retrieval of exposures, and provide a basis for ongoing digitization."

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Reiner Selent, IT Manager 

"It was our aim to integrate radiological procedures into the IT infrastructure with appropriate archive management. In order to meet this requirement for 32,000 radiological examinations a year we had to supplement our existing hospital information system (HIS) and radiology information system (RIS) from the iSOFT company to include a PACS," says IT manager Reiner Selent, explaining the starting point for the procurement of a digital picture archiving and communication system. It had to have a functioning link with the RIS and preferably be LINUX or UNIX-based. "We wanted to realize clinic-wide image distribution employing web technology. In order to make us independent from a single vendor we did not want the system to be restricted to Internet Explorer or other Windows components," Mr. Selent explains

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St.-Johannes-Hospital Dortmund in Germany
trusts in JiveX from VISUS

The St.-Johannes-Hospital Dortmund (JoHo), a 570-bed hospital of the tertiary care category in Germany, serves close to 27,000 inpatients and more than 18,000 outpatients annually. It sports one of the largest cardiology departments in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, as well as a large cardio, thorax, and vascular surgery department. “In these fields, we are the leading hospital in Dortmund. With our cardiovascular focus, we offer medical services at the level of maximum care”, is how Director of finances Fred Oberhag characterizes his hospital.

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Prof. Dr. Joachim Brossmann, Director of radiology

With its 834 patient beds, Kreiskrankenhaus Rendsburg-Eckernfoerde counts among the largest hospitals in the North German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein. Each year, a total of 15 medical departments of this hospital in the regional care provider category serve approximately 42,000 outpatients and 38,000 inpatients. The Institute for Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, headed by Prof. Dr. med. Joachim Brossmann, acts as a hub for all medical departments. A key focus here is on digital mammography and early detection of breast cancer; approximately 10,000 patient exams are carried out annually, with an upward trend.

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