Integration of medical images into the total hospital information system-experiences at Kochi Medical School

Since 1989, the integration of medical images into the total hospital information system (HIS) at Kochi Medical School has been investigated. The developed system was put into practice in August 1997 after a test run was conducted between October 1995 and July 1997. The basic concept of the integration is that the doctors can retrieve and view images such as the textual data of lab exams on desktop personal computers (PC) used to operate the total HIS. During the realization process of the integration we found that several conditions should be satisfied in order to make the integrated system effective and attractive for doctors. Particular attention was paid to the processing time required to acquire images from the image database system using the image viewing station. The image access time should be at least less than a half minute. After making various improvements, very fast image accessing was realized. However, the final system still has three problems: quality of the image display, operation of multi-exams and quality assurance of the digital image.