Internal Image Viewing with exoPACS – Review & MDT
Who should read this?
Those involved in service improvement, especially with regards to shared care across organisations, patient referrals and of course, MDT meetings. This includes Clinicians, Other image users, Radiology and PACS managers, MDT co-ordinators, and IT personnel
- Clinicians & Other Image users
- Consultant Radiologists
- Radiology Business Managers
- MDT co-ordinators and Managers
- PACS Managers
- IT Personnel
What are the key benefits of using this module?
- Reduce Costs – huge case-releasing savings against storage on main PACS
- Improve MDT efficiency – images are integral with the patient notes, when used with Ardeo’s eMDT product. The images display within eMDT, without the need to jump between browsers
- Improve Image Availability – images are instantly available to clinicians to assess for patient referral, image review, or of course MDT
- Reduce Clerical Burden – avoid RIS registrations for foreign imaging – thanks to not using main PACS; and patients not admitted dont need booking into either PAS or RIS
- Achieve Freedom – achieve interoperability and avoid vendor lock-in using international standards to encourage selection of best-of-breed systems
What are the main features of this module?
- A lightweight IHE XDS-I viewer, that works in any web browser
- Tight in-app integration for sites using Ardeo’s eMDT product
- A vendor neutral fully DICOM conformant archive
- Industry-standard, low-cost storage
- IHE XDS-I viewer
Not to be confused with..
The eMDT module of our bbRad data-sharing product. That module enables authenticated eMDT users (eg MDT co-ordinators) to transfer radiology imaging and reports, directly from eMDT – without the need to raise separate transfer requests to radiology. As well as saving admin, this keeps images and non-image information tightly bound, and works with all major PACS systems.
Reduce costs – Storage separate from Main PACS
To provide storage and viewing for foreign studies, exoPACS integrates with all your foreign image sources, for example IEP, VPN transfers and bbRad transfers. Its partitioning feature means foreign imaging is kept cleanly separated from any data from other modules that on your exoPACS installation.
Keeping foreign studies separate from Main PACS means that all exams are archived in industry-standard yet low-cost storage – main PACS has significantly higher storage costs, and they are already stored in the sending sites’ main PACS, so there is no need to duplicate that cost.
Benefits
- huge cash-releasing savings against all other storage options
- robust archiving of images and reports can be permanent, or
- short-term archiving so older imaging ‘falls off’ after a pre-determined period
- data is fully integrated into the Trust’s backup and fail-over mechanisms full access, recall, and control of data
Improve MDT efficiency
When used with Ardeo’s eMDT product, MDT efficiency improves hugely, with some sites reducing MDT turnaround time from 6 weeks down to only 1 week.
Just like radiologists reporting from their RIS worklist, MDTs can run from the patient notes within eMDT. When an image is required, it is displayed from within eMDT; there is no need to separately search PACS.
Benefits
- huge cash-releasing savings against all other storage options
- improved quality of reporting, through availability of all available priors
- reduced clerical/administrative overhead, as priors are pre-fetched automatically
- screening data fully integrated into the Trust’s backup and fail-over mechanisms
- full compliance with information governance and caldicott requirements
Improve Image Availability
Foreign images are available to all clinicians hospital-wide, immediately. Because exoPACS is off-PACS, there is no need to point external images to a system admin workstation or other staging area. There is no need to wait for a system administrator to ‘tidy-up’, orprofile or verify the foreign exams on PACS before they are available to clinicians.
But exoPACS is more than just an archive, it is an intelligent archive. HL7 integration with PAS enables it to request imaging, either via XDS-I or bbRad, to re-request foreign imaging, for example if configured so that older studies ‘fall-off’ the archive, these can be re-queried from their source locations.
Benefits
- huge cash-releasing savings against all other storage options
- improved quality of reporting, through availability of all available priors
- reduced clerical/administrative overhead, as priors are pre-fetched automatically
- screening data fully integrated into the Trust’s backup and fail-over mechanisms
- full compliance with information governance and caldicott requirements
Reduce Clerical Burden
Because exoPACS is off-PACS, it means you don’t need to pre-register those studies on PAS and RIS, just for review. This saves a huge workload for PACS administrators and MDT co-ordinators.
Benefits
- improved quality of care, through availability of all available priors
- reduced clerical/administrative overhead, as priors are pre-fetched automatically
- full compliance with information governance and caldicott requirements
Future-proofing, Ownership and Control of Data
Cypher IT provide the software, installation and on-going support services for exoPACS; the Trust provides the hardware, including disk storage and associated redundancy or fail-over. By separating software supply from hardware supply, Trusts are able to procure disk space strategically across multiple services (eg shared on a SAN or NAS), and in particular, much more cost-effectively. This enables us to offer a value proposition far exceeding that of traditional PACS vendors’ storage proposals.
exoPACS is an XDS-I archive (the conformance statement is in exoPACS Technical Details). This means that an IHE XDS-I compliant viewer from any vendor can be used to view studies on exoPACS. The XDS-I configuration, like the configuration of DICOM nodes, is open for your administrators to use; we do not password protect or otherwise restrict customer access to these areas. Thus we do not restrict access to or control of your own data. Furthermore, because access mechanisms are based on IHE standards, the mechanism to access the data is future-proofed.
The reason we don’t restrict access is because Cypher IT’s approach is to earn income by providing software and services that solves problems and adds value; we are a healthcare software company rather than a service or man-days company. Because of this we empower our customers to administer their own system and their own data.
Finally, because the hardware and disk storage is provided by the Trust, then as well as being better value for you to procure, it also allows you to integrate exoPACS easily into your IT strategy. exoPACS can be delivered as a virtual server, and storage can be on a SAN or NAS that is shared with other hospital systems. It can therefore be backed up, replicated, and made available for failover in the same way as other systems’ data, simplifying your IT design, administration and business continuity planning.
Benefits
- cost savings realised through the use of virtualisation and distributed storage
- integrated backup, replication and business continuity
- simplified IT administration