Radiology Online: All The Benefits Of Film Imaging, But At A Reduced Cost

Diagnostic radiology has made vast advances since digital electronic technologies have been used in medical imaging applications. With the inception of the DICOM digital imaging platform, medical images taken from different modalities such at CT, PET, MRI, Mammography, Ultrasound and others can now all be translated into DICOM format, which has fast become a universal language that can be read by a wide variety of digital radiology equipment. By switching to digital imaging, which is not as hard as it sounds because even film equipment can often be retrofitted for the purpose at a savings to you, many hospitals and large to smaller medical facilities experience a cost benefit in the production, viewing, storing and handling of digital diagnostic radiology images. With the advent of the Internet, further sweeping changes have played out that enhance the speed of every digital imaging transaction, saving you money in the process. By taking advantage of radiology online, your medical facility can experience the affordability that comes through digital medical imaging. For example, you may need a PACS system to work not only for your one office, but one that can be accessed by many offices so that each individual facility does not have to go out and buy separate PACS. Web-based PACS solve this common problem brilliantly. The medical offices can all access the system via a local-area network, wide-area network and even a virtual-private network, allowing simultaneous usage and not only speeding up the process of retrieval and transmission of DICOM images, but also helping you to see more patients throughout the day because you have eliminated wasted time with postal mail and couriers to distribute hard copies of medical images. You can also make the archiving of patient records much more affordable when using radiology online. Digital images can be saved in a number of different ways. While they can be printed to create a hard copy, they need not be. You can store many digital images on a tiny CD or DVD, for example. DICOM images can also be stored on a server device. This is a small unit that can hold up to many terabytes of digital information safely and securely, eliminating the costly need for large repository rooms to hold hard copy patient records, and the personnel to manage them. The PACS radiology equipment can also be used for the storage of disaster recovery documents by sending DICOM-formatted records to an offsite server, which may be located online. For these reasons, many medical facilities turn to digital diagnostic radiology solutions.

In this article Jonathon Blocker writes about diagnostic radiology and radiology online