Are you looking for ways to improve your DICOM Image transfers securely and increase efficiency at your hospital or facility? While new practices are adapting to the latest advancements, some are apprehensive to make the change due to various challenging factors (i.e., change management, process improvement, limited budgets).
Learn the five ways you can improve digital communications, performance and increase your efficiency all while maintaining data integrity, security, and quality control with a Gateway DICOM Router integrated with your PACS.
1) Improving DICOM Image Transfers – when choosing the right solution for your facility, you want to make sure that it has modern-day features. Our Gateway™ DICOM router is a vendor-neutral archiving solution. The router has an optional feature that can communicate via HL7, which ensures a seamless interface/transfers of patient demographics and report information between systems. The HL7 communication tool has helped our customers above and beyond what the average solution can do while maintaining HIPAA compliance. It follows the DICOM standard to store patient data, which saves you time and money spent on the headaches that data migration and cleansing can cause.
2) Increase Data Integrity – Since PACS solutions have entered practice walls, administrators have been working tirelessly to clean up studies, messy files, and duplicates in the system – all while maintaining data security. We’ve come a long way since then.
The Internet has revolutionized radiology as we know it. It’s not uncommon for DICOM studies to be routed to a cloud PACS, or to a central server located at an off-site location. Historically, VPNs were needed to send studies securely over the Internet. However, challenges with VPN setup, maintenance, and downtime have taken DICOM routing in a new direction:
Many hospitals and practices utilize a DICOM router and PACS technology that is capable of leveraging TLS protocols for encryption, authentication, and data integrity. A secure connection that utilize 256-bit SSL certificates can commonly be found pushing DICOM studies over the Internet – meaning there is no need for VPN’s.
Today’s tools can also clean up data such as facility names, modalities, study descriptions, and anatomy in every study. Keeping data consistent is the key to allow PACS protocols to be in proper working order. These improvements in data integrity trickle down to improvements in study access control, hanging protocols, work-list configuration, routing capabilities, and much more.
3) VNA Capabilities – Upgrading your DICOM router to include VNA capabilities can help your organization consolidate and manage your storage environment, and increase redundancy capabilities. Many sites may ship their studies somewhere else for reading, so all they require is a DICOM router with archiving capabilities to store reported studies. Advanced routers may also have image viewing capabilities, which allows for some quality control before being in route for interpretation.
4) Maintain Quality Control – Our Gateway™ DICOM router is a full-featured, online DICOM vendor neutral archive, built on the same SQL platform as our PACS database. It’s designed to store, retrieve, and archive hundreds of thousands of studies per year, while its intuitive DICOM solution provides unmatched functionality and flexibility.
5) Increasing Efficiency – DICOM routers are the core that keeps a practice running. Currently, DICOM routers utilize transfer protocols that can minimize the overhead that causes network congestion. High-volume organizations employ multi-threading techniques to stream multiple images or studies simultaneously across the network.
DICOM routers today can leverage compression algorithms that sometimes are not achievable when sending from the modality to the PACS directly.
Curious to learn more about how our Gateway™ DICOM router can improve your hospital’s operations? Download our brochure or talk to one of our experts today!
