In mid of 2004, the Azienda Ospedaliera San Camillo Forlanini, based in Rome, commissioned EBIT AET a cardiology PACS project aimed at rationalization of the activities within its interventional cardiology section. Two new fully digital cath-labs, based on flat panel technology, and a third traditional room allows the centre to perform nearly 4,000 procedures per year, one of the most productive site in Italy and well recognized for the high level of treatment.
Without a PACS and a suitable information system, the administration realized, it was impossible to maintain track of procedural data. Shelves full of CDs made impossible to find rapidly priors examination and most of the time of technicians was spent in making duplicated copies and manually cataloguing CDs. Yet, as the centre participates to trials and multi-centric research, it was difficult to register and then extract significant data, that could have an impact on clinical activities.
The installation of EBIT AET cardiology PACS was completed in turn of three months. The storage area network maintains more that 15,000 procedures and cardiologists can visualize any of those procedures in less than a second from any image display workstation. Patient demographies and clinical indications can be taken by the hospital information system, while EBIT AET Cardioplanet allows recording of all clinical and procedural information available during the interventions. Statistics on the activity can be made anytime with just one click and data can be collected in graphical form for an immediate analysis.
A digital preserving and archiving system, fully automatic, elimates the need of supervising any image recording operation, leaving technicians the time to make more productive work. Cases are then made available in real-time to cardiosurgeons via the web, so that they can consult the case from their stations without having to move to the cath-lab.
