Case study - Multi-facility Maternal Fetal Medicine practice
A national group of MFM practices was looking to convert from paper-based to digital storage and reading of their OB ultrasound studies. They evaluated solutions from a range of PACS providers, both large and small.
Challenge
As a practice with perinatologists, they had a special workflow they wanted to follow where the sonographer could collect and review images captured by the ultrasound machine before sending them to the perinatologist for review.
The perinatologist would review the images, sometimes deleting images that were not definitive. Many times the perinatologist would go into the ultrasound room to acquire more images, which would then be sent to his workstation for review. After reviewing the additional images on his workstation, the perinatologist would complete his report in the facility EMR system and send the study to PACS for archiving.
A summary of the workflow is shown below:
Solution
Connect Imaging proposed a solution that utilized the ViewBox workstation module with some changes. One modification involved the addition of a feature that would allow images to be received directly to the workstation and displayed on the screen as they were received. This is not the standard feature already available with ViewBox where studies are received in the background and added to the worklist for display and reading by the radiologist. Rather, images would be received and displayed in real time so the sonographer could review the images collected as they were acquired by the ultrasound machine.
A second feature that was added to ViewBox was the ability to send studies from ViewBox via DICOM transfer to multiple DICOM recipients. This feature allowed the sonographer to send the partially completed study to the perinatologist for review, and also allowed the perinatologist to send the completed study to FileRoom for archiving after he completed his report.
This workflow has recently been further enhanced by adding features to automatically send studies to the perinatologist when the sonographer had completed the current study, and to provide tracking to make sure additional images were sent to the perinatologist workstation when they had been acquired.
As the Connect Imaging PACS was installed in more of the practices, a corporate decision was made to establish a deep archive and backup at the corporate data center so that backups would not need to be done at each practice. Connect Imaging responded to this additional need by creating a Deep Archive FileRoom service that would maintain multiple backups and long term archives for each practice, allowing studies to be removed from the local FileRoom archives after a year while still maintaining a link to the studies on the deep archive.
Benefits
The immediate benefit to the MFM group practice was that they could utilize a productive workflow that no other PACS company could provide. An additional benefit of these additional features in ViewBox was that other users of ViewBox, such as radiologists in a hospital using a traditional study workflow, now had the ability to send studies from their workstation to another DICOM recipient, such as a dedicated 3D reconstruction workstation.
