Public hospital Villa Scassi is situated in the western side of Genoa. When EBIT AET was encharged to provide its PACS system, the hospital was subject to a general re-organization which, in turns of a few years, has completely changed its face in terms of new technology and level of informatization. In January 2004 the hospital was one of first public institutions in Italy to stop film distribution to outpatients in favour of CD-ROMs containing both images and an electronic copy of the report.
It is impressive to see how the level of informatization has impacted on time reduction to complete a report and make it available to clinical departments or ER. In turns of twelve months, the hospital passed from a huge and costing film documentation to 94% reduction due to the PACS. In the words of the administration, this result was possible due to two main drivers
- the first reason lies in the deep integration of the information system and the capillarity of the network connection. Each and any clinical department, including the operating rooms, was able to receive the outcome of a radiology exam on a computer, together with associated key images, and all of them received a separate training on the use of the system
- the second one resides in the strong and precise leadership exercised by the project team, as well as the capability of the internal staff to cooperate with and support EBIT AET staff
Villa Scassi PACS architecture is based on a multi-processor cluster of servers, that exploits a 8 TeraBytes in a storage area network to collects the 120,000 radiological examinations performed in the radiology section. Nearly 15 workstations for soft-copy reading are available for radiologists in all sections, where reports are dictated by using speech recognition technology.
EBIT AET has also integrated the cath-lab into the PACS, where about 1,000 procedures per year are performed in interventional cardiology.
