A DICOM Router And Viewer For Medical Office Productivity - Health

Today's hospital and medical facilities are busy places, seeing thousands of patients over the course of a year. With each patient examination, digital medical images and text data will be produced, and the medical facility needs an efficient way to handle this data so that each piece of individual patient information can be viewed, sent and archived in an appropriate and timely manner. There are two pieces of medical equipment that are useful in this regard, and they are the Dicom viewer and the DICOM router.

Once a digital image has been captured by a modality, such as CR, DR, MRI, CT, PET, mammography, ultrasound and others, the image can then be seen via a Dicom viewer. The Dicom viewer is essentially a medical software component that runs on a personal computer with a high-end, high-resolution diagnostic monitor attached.

The viewer not only automates routine tasks that occur when medical studies must be retrieved, stored and handled, but also can be customized to make the task of viewing the digital images flow more smoothly for the radiologist and diagnosing physicians.

A viewer allows more than one physician to view digital images at the same time, greatly enhancing office workflow. Retrieving patient images can also be done on a automated basis, saving you the steps needed to perform this task repeatedly throughout the workday.

Multiple studies can be viewed on the same computer screen as well. Once you have the images up on your computer, you can customize many features to make the viewer optimized for your particular needs. The layout of the images can be set to your specifications, saving you the time of having to do this by hand for each study. On-screen annotations as well as hanging protocols can also be customized to suit your needs.

After you have viewed the study, it may need to be sent to other physicians or to a storage archive. This is when a DICOM router helps to augment the process. With a router that is web-based, you have a great deal of flexibility in sending and receiving digital medical images. Studies can be viewed on a local area or wide area network, or can be viewed securely via a virtual private network. The router is used to make sure that the images get where they need to go quickly and accurately. Images can be sent to consulting physicians as well when a viewer on a clinical workstation and a router are in place in the medical facility.

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