Dr Patrick Malloy
© 2001 Joe Morek/ MOREK Studios
Danbury Hospital is a teaching health care institution, serving approximately 360 000 residents of western Connecticut and southeastern New York, USA. The Department of Radiology at Danbury Hospital performs approximately 160 000 examinations annually, a number that increases by about ten percent each year.
Danbury Hospital purchased its image management system from Philips Medical Systems, with whom Sectra has a strong and successful partnership since 1997 in providing PACS solutions to the North American continent.
In November 2001, the radiology department at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut, USA, went into full-digital operation.
"The greatest advantage in my opinion is the possibility for several doctors to look at the same image at the same time, but at different sites in the enterprise. This is especially important when treating trauma patients or Intensive Care Unit patients where constant availability to images is critical. It may even be a matter of life or death." Dr Patrick Malloy, chairman of the radiology department at Danbury Hospital says.
"Also, several referring clinicians have explained how their work has been facilitated by the PACS. Before the digitization, there was a lot of down time for the clinicians, since they always had to come over to the radiology department to look at images or to get a radiologist's opinion on a patient. Now, we conduct conferences on the fly, which saves a lot of time." Dr Malloy continues.
Enterprise plans to open a large outpatient imaging center outside of the hospital was another important reason to implement the PACS. Radiologists can now review images at the two sites simultaneously, since the facilities share the same workflow manager and image archive.
