Digital Equipment Corp and Siemens Medical Systems Inc are collaborating on development of a Picture Archiving & Communications System that will enable hospitals to integrate medical images and patient information on departmental and organisation-wide computer networks. Announcing their plans at the annual conference of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago, the partners explained that the Picture Archiving & & Communications System will integrate technologies from medical imaging, image processing, data communications, information management and storage and computer design. It will provide the means to acquire, store, retrieve and display medical images and related patient data at one console or at multiple locations. Our companies share a strategic vision of the completely automated radiology department of the 1990s, said Richard Corely, DEC’s group manager for health care and pharmaceutical industries marketing. Since Siemens already uses Digital’s VAX processors as components that are built into Siemens’ medical equipment, it makes sense for us to integrate the medical information on their systems into department and hospital-wide networks. At the conference, DEC also anounced version 3.1 of its VAX DECrad software and a marketing agreement with IDX Corp for its joint marketing as part of IDX’s total Hospital Information System, which provides patient accounting and general accounting, as well as clinical, ancillary and administrative applications. DECrad integrates the activities of a radiology department into a centralised database of patient registration, patient tracking, examination scheduling, film library management, accounting and management reporting. Version 3.1 adds the capability to distribute a database over as many as three processors linked by Ethernet. It also has a Dictation Interface to receive information from industry standard radiology reporting dictation systems. A new DECtalk Inquiry Function also presents synthesised-speech versi ons of diagnostic reports to requesting physicians over the phone.
