Success Stories

New Port Richey Community Hospital. GE Walker helped this Florida hospital accomplish a major update of systems and equipment in the areas of Nuclear Medicine, Nuclear Cardiology, and Echocardiology:

• Central archiving for Nuclear Medicine and Echocardiology
• Upgrade Nuclear Medicine network from Token-ring to Ethernet and connect Nuclear Medicine to the Radiology network
• Provide PACS workstations for general Nuclear Medicine and Nuclear Cardiology processing, review and quantitative analysis
• Provide PACS workstations for Echocardiology and general Ultrasound review
• Integrate the Nuclear Medicine/Echocardiology PACS with the rest of the radiology network

Following are several other examples of the capabilities that our partner Thinking Systems can bring to PACS solutions.

Yale-New Haven Hospital. Thinking Systems Inc. brought the full potential of PACS to General Nuclear Medicine for the first time:

• A central archive system for all Nuclear Medicine images, including raw, processed, and report pages
• New, fast PACS workstations for Nuclear Medicine to replace the existing dedicated review workstations
• Eliminated the inter-dependency between the cameras and workstations on the network
• Integrated with the hospital PACS and the existing Teleradiology servers
• Integrated with the hospital information system to provide modality worklist to the non-DICOM scanners
• Reduced or eliminated the need for hardcopies
• Increased the throughput

Massachusetts General Hospital. Thinking Systems Inc. solved image archiving and distribution issues for this major hospital through the following services:

• Provided a dedicated archive server for
  PET-CT
• Integrate PET-CT archiving with the hospital PACS
• Solved the speed issue for data transfer from the scanner to IMPAX
• Solved the reliability and speed issue for data transfer from IMPAX to Mirada workstations

Now, physicians can always count on their images being on the workstation when they need them. It only takes 1-2 minutes to tranfer a complete PET-CT study to the Agfa IMPAX.

Radiologix. Thinking Systems Inc. helped Advanced Radiology of Baltimore, part of the Radiologix network, to integrate a system involving multiple workstations, locations, modalities, and vendors, as well as mobile scanners and outdated equipment. The following benefits were achieved:

• Central image archive
• Image accessible from any location
• Single workstation to handle all modalities – General Nuclear Medicine, Nuclear Cardiology, PET, PET-CT fusion, MR, etc.
• Web server with workstation functionality for reading physicians
• Web server for referral physicians

Oklahoma Cardiovascular Associates. OCA uses all cardiology modalities and had two PACS deployed already. But they couldn’t integrate Nuclear Cardiology into either PACS. Thinking Systems, Inc. brought OCA a solution to deliver these improvements:

• Integrated Nuclear Cardiology into PACS, including archiving, processing, quantitative analysis, and review
• Connectd non-DICOM Nuclear scanners to PACS
• Created capability to view all modalities from one workstation
• Integrated with existing PACS