11.4.2013
Hrvatski Telekom, the leading provider of telecommunications services in Croatia, in cooperation with the German company Medavis and its regional partner I&I, presented the radiology in the cloud pilot project named croRIS which linked the Dubrava Clinical Center and the Dubrovnik General Hospital via portal4med web service to information stored in the HT cloud.
CroRIS is a central service for management and connection of various systems for storage of radiology information generated in various health institutions.
Presently, in the radiology units of health institutions (state and county hospitals, medical centers, private hospitals and health institutions) various types of IT systems are employed, ranging from own local solutions and open-source applications to technologically most up-to-date radiology information systems (RIS) and picture archiving and communication systems (PACS).
Public health institutions mostly lack the financial means and do not have sufficient know-how and resources for procurement and implementation of adequate quality RIS/PACS systems. Moreover, there is no obligation in place to link such systems, which results in repeated and unnecessary radiographic examinations of patients, in the lack of control over the radiation (unnecessarily) absorbed in the patient and in insufficient quality of the radiology finding.
By application of teleradiology (remote reading of radiology findings), the existing organizational and technological segmentation of these important medical services could be consolidated and linked, and the efficiency of both medical equipment and medical staff could be substantially improved; the final aim would be to increase the quality of healthcare and to reduce costs of medical treatment.
The croRIS project aims to consolidate and link all radiology units in the territory of the Republic of Croatia into a single system connected to all reference systems and subsystems (CEZIH, hospital information centers, primary health care systems and other health care sub-systems, as well as links to international medical centers).
"This project would enable establishment of a unique data base of radiology patients, their findings and related pictures, including the option to integrate the entire visual and textual information in a centralized systems, thus creating a patient's electronic radiology record", said Dragan Korolija Marinić, Head of the Dubrava Clinical Center.
"Hrvatski Telekom is one of the first telecom operators in Europe to offer cloud computing services based on state-of-the-art technology and placed in a secure HT Data Center. The presented teleradiology pilot should become the central service for management and connection of various systems for storage of radiology information generated in various health institutions and stored in the HT Cloud, via web services. The only prerequisite for that is Internet access ", said Višnja Lovrek, Leader of the eZdravlje Project at Hrvatski Telekom.
"Portal4med is an innovative platform that combines various medical portals to manage workflow in medical networks. portal4med is based on Web 2.0 technology, and complies with the latest international communication and security standards. This portal takes over main functions such as the general patient management system (Master Patient Index), serves as a repository for documents and makes all the data in the electronic cas file available ”, said Denis Bićanić from I&I Company.