German hospital interfaces angiography with image IT

ERLANGEN, Germany – The Peine Clinic in Lower Saxony has become the first hospital in Germany to interface its angiography systems with an image management and reporting system.

All data generated prior to or during an intervention in the cardiac cath lab is now automatically transferred to the new IT system.

The advantage of this is that while the examination is still in progress, operating personnel can use important examination data to prepare a report for wards or referring physicians in just a matter of minutes. Previously, this took several hours, because the data was transferred from forms to the reporting system manually and the images were also stored manually.

For this innovative IT solution in the catheter laboratory in Peine, Siemens interfaced its image archiving system syngo Dynamics with the angiographic system Axiom Artis FC and the hemodynamic measuring station Axiom Sensis XP.

In May 2008, the former community hospital in Peine opened a cardiac catheter laboratory.

To begin with the most efficient environments possible, the Peine Clinic chose Siemens's syngo Dynamics cardiology image management and reporting system.

In the past, one of the most time-consuming tasks in the clinical routine for cardiac cath has been the preparation of reports.

The large amount of data that had to be transferred manually from different forms, or from external data media, to the electronic reporting systems caused long delays in report availability.

The Peine Clinic chose Siemens to install a solution that would significantly reduce the amount of time and effort for report preparation following cardiac catheterization.

To achieve this objective, Siemens interfaced its multi-modality image archiving system syngo Dynamics with the angiographic system Axiom Artis FC and the hemodynamic measurement station Axiom Sensis XP. An interface to the clinic's ultrasound systems will be added in the future.

Axiom Sensis XP, a state-of-the art recording procedure for interventional cardiology and electrophysiology, even transmits measurement data automatically to syngo Dynamics via real-time data transfer.

Directly at their syngo Dynamics workstations, the reporting physicians are now provided with all data required to prepare the necessary reports as soon as catheterization is completed. This considerably accelerates the workflow in the cardiology department and allows for more precise reporting than in conventional catheter labs.

Wilfried Schröter, Head of Medical Systems of the Peine Clinic, said, "With this scalable solution, we are best equipped to face the technical challenges of the future. Networking will make the data exchange even faster and offer further advantages, for example in long-term archiving. This will certainly expand the existing cooperation of our hospitals."