Standardizing Image Management

By Michael V. Boland, MD, PhD

Digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) is a standard for handling, storing, printing and transmitting medical imaging. By tagging images with a patient’s demographic information, DICOM allows images obtained from various devices from multiple manufacturers to be integrated into a picture archiving and communication system (PACS).

“A good example of a DICOM-compatible image review system in ophthalmology is FORUM^® (Carl Zeiss Meditec), which we’re evaluating in our practice,” says Michael V. Boland, MD, PhD, Johns Hopkins University. “In general, a DICOM-compatible system captures patients’ demographic information from your patient registration system and produces a work list for a particular device. If a patient comes in for an OCT, for example, the system sends a list of patients to the OCT machine, the technician chooses the correct patient from the list and performs the test. This eliminates the potential for data entry errors and, as a result, enhances patient safety and practice efficiency.”

In fact, a study at the Wilmer Eye Institute of Johns Hopkins University showed that implementing a DICOM-compatible work flow reduced the need to enter or edit patients’ demographic information by 50% and reduced the need to manage misfiled images by 85%.¹

“The OCT machine pushes the data back to the image management system, creating a closed loop of registration to image management to device back to image management,” Dr. Boland explains. “That’s the system you would use as the clinician to review those scans in the clinic. We’ve found the technology very beneficial for clinic productivity in terms of less technician time wasted entering data and less staff time wasted reconciling errors that occur when a patient’s information is mistyped.

“With FORUM, we’ve been able to integrate all of our visual fields, all of our OCT machines, lens measurements and corneal topography across ten geographic locations. As more vendors implement the DICOM standards, it’s becoming easier to add devices to the system.” ■

Dr. Michael Boland is an assistant professor and director of information technology at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He is a member of the Medical Information Technology Committee of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

Reference

Reprinted from “Improving Efficiencies and Outcomes in the Glaucoma Practice,” a special supplement to the May/June 2014 edition of Ophthalmic Professional.