The University of Adelaide's School of Animal and Veterinary Sciences at the Roseworthy Campus is home to four purpose-built Veterinary Health Centers. The school is focused on its leading-edge curricula, which is supported by the hands-on, practical experience offered through the commercial services provided by these four centers. Part of staying at the forefront is a commitment to investing in the latest veterinary-specific technology, to offer the most relevant training to its students, and also to ensure that all patients receive the highest possible standards of care.

A PACS that had limitations

As part of Adelaide University, the Veterinary Health Centre has access to a comprehensive Practice Management System and various modalities including digital radiography and ultrasound systems. While all these systems functioned well independently, the key piece of technology that would enable these systems to integrate - the Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) - was poorly specified and not delivering as expected.

Bessy Rasmussen, Director of the Veterinary Health Centres, shared that there were a number of short comings with their PACS, "It was far from what we needed to meet our requirements. From an educational point of view, we couldn't show students the images we wanted to share with them when we wanted to. And from the point of view of running the commercial arm of the centres, we simply couldn't do so with a system just that didn't work for us."

What the School of Animal and Veterinary Sciences needed

After some investigation, Bessy and her team identified ARO Systems as a systems integrator capable of, not only addressing the issues they faced, but also of helping them clearly specify what was needed to best address these issues.

It was agreed that the school needed a PACS that:

• Was designed specifically for veterinary-use, incorporating all relevant fields;
• Was integrated with the University's IDEXX Cornerstone PMS;
• Was comprehensively supported by specialists in medical and veterinary imaging technology;
• Was relocated to a virtual server environment to offer more flexibility and secure backups;
• Able to support as many modalities as required by the School;
• Provided a centralized location for all image storage, eliminating issues of lost images;
• Was able to store a vast number of images in line with DICOM standards.

In response to the named requirements, ARO Systems recommended a combination of vet-specific technologies to address all of the school's needs. This included VET-WEBX PACS, VET-VIEW Workstation, OrthoView Vet and iQ-ROUTER PREMIUM.

Achieving true integration throughout the Vet Centres

Following the implementation of these solutions at the school, Bessy has been keen to share its success: "The new system is capable of doing what we want it to do:

• It's designed for veterinary-use, we can track all veterinary-specific information we couldn't before;
• It's integrated to the Cornerstone PMS, eliminating the need for multiple instances of data entry, and ensuring one source of the truth for all patient information;
• It integrates with the University's systems and is constantly backed up, eliminating any risk of data loss:
• It's hosted on a virtual server, giving us far more flexibility than we had before;
• It can support an unlimited number of DICOM nodes, allowing to use it with as many modalities as we need, and therefore, remaining viable as a solution as we continue to grow;
• It can store up to 500 million images in a single database, so we can store as many images as we want to; and
• It allows users to access the images via online browsers, so they can be easily viewed on mobile devices and easily shared with owners and referrers.

For any practice that is looking to modernize their imaging equipment for the future, I would definitely recommend engaging ARO Systems. We have had an excellent experience working with them so far and look forward to doing so in the future."