PACSolution for Multi-Functional Hospital, North-Kazakhstan

High-level multidisciplinary medical care for the population of the North-Kazakhstan region is the main aim of the North-Kazakhstan Regional Multi-Functional Hospital. With an amount of 25 facilities, they are the largest diagnostic imaging provider in this region. Besides 5 major facilities like the Regional Oncology Center, 4 city polyclinics and 13 remote hospitals belong to the group.

To reach the goal of providing best medical care, the hospital needed to upgrade their IT infrastructure and requested a centralized studies storage with the help of a regional-level PACS solution. Until the beginning of the cooperation with IMAGE Information Systems and their on-site sales partner TND LLP KZ in 2019, the customer was faced with different challenges. These led to long, medically unacceptable waiting times for patients and unnecessarily complicated workflows for staff:

  • No PACS in combination with overloaded medical equipment workstations

A huge amount of studies ended up being stored on medical equipment workstations until overloaded, instead of being stored in a regional PACS

  • Diagnosis for mammography screening up to 2 months

Important mammography screening studies were printed on film and transported only once a month from remote facilities to the oncology center for a second opinion and back again. Therefore, a diagnosis could take up to 2 months.

  • Different HIS in region

The use of two different hospital information systems led to redundant data storage and increased search times

The need to organize the clinical workflow on a regional level with a modern PACS, so that all data can be managed properly (in time and quality), was accordingly the primary goal of the project implementation.

Whereby the following combined software solutions from IMAGE Information Systems could remedy the situation:

  • iQ-WEBX unlimited x 1
  • iQ-4VIEW unlimited x 1
  • iQ-WORKLIST PREMIUM x 1
  • iQ-WEBX WADO HL7 x 1
  • iQ-ROUTER PREMIUM x 1
  • iQ-ROUTER PRO x 2
  • iQ-ROUTER x 22
  • iQ-VIEW PRO x 3
  • iQ-VIEW x 22

The implementation of the solution took three weeks. In addition, 2 HIS integrations for the first year of use and training for 300 iQ-WEB users took place. As well as a new server was installed in the provider's data center.

With the changes made, the facilities of the North-Kazakhstan region can now perform fast reading of studies from remote sites and there is an archive for all patient studies. Furthermore, a dynamic patient monitoring has been enabled and the performance and security of data transmission significantly increased.