The hospital Azienda Ospedaliera Universitaria San Martino dates back five centuries and has a widespreadstructure, with some 20 Km of internal streets and over 4,500 employees. The radiology section, now unified under an imaging department, performs some 300,000 radiological examinations distributed in eleven units inclusing a diagnostic centre situated downtown and connected to the central site through a wide area network.
When EBIT AET was commissioned to digitize the radiologies, at the end of 2003, most of the radiology units had their own information system, with their own demographic database. The administration goal was to rationalize the system by intervening on the data workflow. The first step was to centralize the distributed information under a single archive, based on EBIT AET Risolution, and to integrate the RIS with the existing hospital information system based on HL7.
In parallel, the hospital started an ambitious plan for replacing obsolete equipment with most modern imaging modalities, that conducted to the acquisition and the implementation of an integrated EBIT AET PACS. Several CT multislices, four DR, a number of MRs and some digital cath lab rooms everyday pushes hundreds of Gigabytes to the clusterized image archive, which manages a multi-Terabytes fiber-channel storage area network and a digital preserving system. Clinical departments get inpatient outputs from the radiology via a web-based image and report distribution. In October 2005, the hospital started the distribution of CDs to outpatients in substitution of traditional films.
In its process to reach paper-less and film-less, San Martino is thinking to move in further. Next steps will concern the connection of all operating rooms and the access to radiological information from general practicioners.
