Healthcare Software as a Service: The Greater Paris Region Program Experience -- The So-called "Région Sans Film" Program

The "Region Sans Film" ("Filmless Region") program was launched in 2009 by the French ministry of health in order to help the generalization to all healthcare structures such as hospitals or general physician practices, of Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), Radiological Information Systems (RIS) and archiving of medical images. It is done by means of a service platform whom building and running has been confided to an industrial consortium. This platform implements the latest technologies of medical image processing and of cloud computing. It is built in order to support service-oriented enterprise architecture composed of one main layer of software services. It is innovative because it is the first one which contains all the materials for the implementation of all services in the cloud, allowing for each healthcare structure to open these services beyond its borders. This opens new opportunities for the implementation of new business processes/services around sharing of images such as teleradiology or access to the images produced in hospitals to the general practitioners. By these means, the exercise of real film less radiology can be more widely achieved.