Some Consideration on Hospital-wide PACS from the Experience in Tokyo Hitachi Hospital

Tokyo Hitachi Hospital has used a hospital-wide PACS for these two years, that is probably the first experience in the world. The system runs 100Mbps optical fiber network over the hospital including outpatients clinics, wards, one treatment room, and radiology department with 11 image workstations and an image database. We have managed about 400,000 image of about 10,600 patients so far. The system has been designed for use in wards, clinics, treatment room and conference room. So physicians and engineers have made many discussions to realize these viewpoints. A complete automation for implementation of the system and the integration of Hospital Information System (HIS) with PACS has been discussed. The hospital-wide PACS has proven to be more usefull for image diagnosis and more effective for image management than that of PACS inside radiology deaprtment in the hospital. An organic integration of PACS with HIS is strongly required for the hospital-wide PACS.