Private DICOM Attribute Conversion

Problem Statement

Two hospitals with two different radiology PACS products agree to open a jointly-owned ambulatory care center. Studies performed at the center are read on the PACS at Hospital A. If prior studies from Hospital B are needed for comparison purposes, there are DICOM incompatibilities between the 2 PACS that cause serious issues. For example:

  • Edited annotations from Hospital B do not display on Hospital A's PACS. This is a serious patient care issue.
  • The procedure codes in both hospitals are different. As a result, relevant studies are not pre-hung, thereby causing manual involvement and negatively impacting radiologist productivity.

The opening of the new ambulatory care center might have to be delayed.

Mach 7 Technologies Solution
  1. Mach 7 Technologies analyzed the problem to determine the root cause. M7T discovered the annotations were stored in non-DICOM conforming private tags. It was also determined that the edited annotations were encoded and required M7T engineers to decode them.
  2. Keystone Engine was deployed.
  3. Using Keystone Management Console, rules were defined to discover the private tags, decode them, encode them in the proper DICOM elements and/or burn the annotations into the image data, and auto-send the studies on to the target system.
  4. Using Keystone Management Console, rules were defined that ensure the procedure codes for Hospital A are mapped to the procedure codes for Hospital B.
  5. Studies that are transferred between the two hospitals are routed through Keystone Engine where DICOM attributes are modified "on the fly" as defined by the rules.
Benefits

Annotations are viewable by the radiologists at both hospitals ensuring proper patient care. Relevant prior studies now show up in the radiologist worklist thereby improving radiologist productivity. This significantly improved radiologist productivity. The ambulatory care center opening was not delayed due to these issues. The ease of use of the Keystone Management Console enabled the IT department to create, edit and maintain procedure code conversion tables and annotation attribute modification without requiring outside professional services, maintaining control and keeping hospital costs low.