Rotterdam hospital installs Europe's first web-based PACS solution
15 June 2006
Rotterdam. The St Franciscus Hospital in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. has
begun installing an iSite picture archiving and communication system
(PACS) service from Philips Medical Systems (Philips), a division of Royal
Philips Electronics (NYSE:PHG, AEX:PHI). The service lets doctors read
studies — including clinical images — from anywhere in the hospital,
increasing productivity and the quality of patient care. Philips' iSite
has been developed by Stentor, a company Philips acquired in 2005. iSite
makes filmless image distribution in the hospital possible without the
prohibitive up-front capital expenditures associated with traditional PACS.
iSite PACS integrates into a health care institution's existing
infrastructure and is today used by hundreds of leading hospitals and
imaging centres. The operations of the system in Rotterdam will be
monitored and managed from the Philips iSite remote control centre in San
Francisco, USA. The combination of proactive remote monitoring and support
allows Philips to identify and correct many potential issues before they
impact the user’s work in the hospital. The service includes routine work
like daily back-ups and routine systems maintenance, which can be performed
by Philips without intervention from hospital employees. The locally-based
hospital system administrators’ tasks are focused around quality control and
support of the clinical users.
The Rotterdam St Franciscus Hospital is pleased with the system because it
improves workflow and patient care. Head of Radiology Ruud van der Marel
explains: “Philips iSite was designed by clinicians who believe that
improved patient care is the most important goal when developing a product.
Clinical time should be spent on diagnosis and therapy, not trying to
decipher multiple tabs and buttons. All our images are immediately available
with the click of the mouse. And because we believe that PACS is life
critical, Philips provides a 99.99% uptime guarantee.” Philips’ European
Healthcare Informatics director Ton van den Hoven commented: “Often
frustrated by PACS implementations that take too long to implement and prove
too expensive, European hospitals have taken notice of the success of iSite
in the US. In Rotterdam we were able to implement iSite in a few months, a
timescale which is unheard of for a PACS installation. We can do that
because it is a flexible and open system that easily adapts to the existing
infrastructure. iSite Enterprise provides clinicians and referring
physicians access to instant diagnostic-quality images anytime, anyplace
throughout their healthcare environment.” To top
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