At an event on Friday, Yorkton Regional Health Centre formally unveiled its RIS/PACS: a new infrastructure expected to reduce patient wait times and shrink the need for duplicate tests.
Yorkton and a few other major centres are the first to come online with the technology, which will eventually be operational in all of the province's radiology departments.
RIS/PACS is actually two distinct systems designed to complement one another: the Radiology Information System (RIS), and the Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS).
PACS is an online archiving and sharing system for diagnostic images - x-rays, ultrasounds, CT scans, and more that replaces the old film prints with digital versions.
"It's the same as your home camera picture-taking, how it's advanced from putting your film in your camera and taking it down and getting it developed, and now you just upload it onto your computer," explained Maria McLaren, technical director of the health centre's medical imaging department.
Implementing the technology for use in hospitals was a little more complicated, of course. To make accurate diagnoses, radiologists require extremely high-quality images displayed on ultra-high-resolution monitors. One of the biggest challenges was standardizing the system across Saskatchewan; a key feature of PACS is the ability for medical professionals to instantly share diagnostic images with one another anywhere in the province.
"When you're working within your own little region, it's easier to keep a lot of that stuff contained, but provincially you have more issues to work with," said McLaren.Under PACS, physically transporting films and repeating diagnostic exams where previous results were unavailable will be things of the past.
The system has been in development since 2005 and is only expected to be fully implemented across the province sometime in the coming year.
The Radiology Information System is the other half of RIS/PACS. RIS electronically stores patient data--admitting information, exam orders, interpretations of results--and links them with the associated images in PACS for easy access by medical staff.
Together, the new systems make for an unprecedented advance in the process of viewing and sharing diagnostic images.
"The whole workflow situation for the staff and for the radiologists has changed for the better," said Sunrise Health Region Chief of Radiology Dr. Johann Hahn.
Hahn estimated an increase in radiologist productivity of up to 50 percent in some cases.
In addition, RIS/PACS will reduce the need for in-person consultations--saving travel time and providing fewer interruptions to radiologists--and will make referrals more effective.
"When you have an urgent report and you phone the referring doctor, that doctor can have the image in front of him in the hospital or in his office."
Provincial Health Minister Don McMorris was present at Friday's event. McMorris said he was especially pleased with the savings RIS/PACS will bring to the province. Eliminating film processing alone is expected to save the healthcare system $3 million annually, although the minister was not certain of the system's total up-front costs.
"There's the monetary savings, and there's the savings of space by getting away from the paper-based system, too. I mean, there'll be three rooms opened up [in Yorkton]."
McMorris also addressed the privacy concerns that the new sharing features might bring, reminding the public that RIS/PACS is a secure system only accessible by authorized healthcare providers.
"We follow along with the safeguards outlined in the Health Information Protection Act. If some people are not even comfortable with that, they have an opportunity to ask for the masking option, which will hide their images stored in the PACS system from individuals."
RIS has been operational in the health region since November, and PACS since December.
