JiveX in sports medicine: The PACS for the pros

With the opening of the Sports Medicine and Prevention Clinic at the Bremen Paracelsus Hospital, the pro footballers saw their health- care fortunes improve too: as of October 2020, the official medical partner for Werder’s Bundesliga players is housed in newly reconfigured facilities right in Bremen’s Weser Stadium. First-rate medicine is practiced here with an eye to the playing field – by first-rate personnel with first-rate equipment. And the image management system they use is JiveX Enterprise PACS.

Coach Florian Kohfeldt and his team will not be the only patients at the Center for Sports Medicine and Prevention, how- ever: the women’s pro soccer teams and the Training Center’s junior teams are treated here as well, along with players from other sports. “Our Center is open to all athletes, from ballet dancers to triathletes. Given our partnership with Werder Bremen, we certainly maintain a focus on injuries from ball sports that center on certain parts of the body – soccer and handball, in other words. The care we provide for professional athletes is also reflected in our diagnostic equipment. Thanks to our 3 Tesla MRI, a modern digital X-ray system and a state-of-the- art ultrasound unit, we can detect even the slightest injuries to structures such as cartilage or the meniscus, and our findings are very fast and extremely reliable,” explains Volker Diehl, clinic manager and head of the Center’s Radiology Department.

Professional image management with JiveX

Having trained as a radiographer, Diehl knows how important a good PACS is for interpreting and managing radiological imaging data. Especially when the imaging, interpreting and archival pro- cesses in some cases span multiple institutions. “We generate the MRI images here in the Center ourselves, but they’re interpreted by a large radiology practice in Bremen that works with its own PACS. So we absolutely need an interoperable solution that is both integrated into our IT structure as well as able to communicate seamlessly with the external PACS in or- der to receive the images after they’ve been interpreted,” Diehl explains. And going with the same manufacturer as the radiology partner wasn’t an option? “No. We made a very conscious decision not to do that and looked for a provider that was flexible, powerful and extremely user-friendly. That’s what led us to VISUS and JiveX.”

The company from Bochum, Germany, impressed clinic managers as well as on-site physicians, who can use JiveX to view all radiological image data and to interpret X-rays as well. Its exceptional user-friendliness made the system easier to launch in the fall of 2020 – no need for highly involved training. “The physicians could access the data quickly, and interpreting and working with X-rays – measuring distances, for example – is a straightforward process. Other advantag- es include the ability to configure workspaces individually and the system’s good options for importing external data and assigning those data to patients. We import all outside examinations – usually several a day – in order to interpret them again and to assess image quality. When in doubt, we order new images. All of that is just seamless and intuitive in JiveX,” says the clinic manager.

Collaboration with other hospitals is likewise not a problem for JiveX. The system offers various ways of easily sharing data with other institutions. The Enter- prise PACS from VISUS works extreme- ly well with other systems, both when receiving data from an external PACS or when sending data to a PACS made by a different manufacturer – and that also lays the foundation for future development of the Center for Sports Medicine and Prevention at Bremen’s Paracelsus Hospital.