For more than 30 years, Regional Medical Imaging has provided superior imaging services to physicians and patients throughout mid-Michigan. RMI strives to enhance the health and wellness of patients not only by providing affordable, high-quality imaging, but by providing it with care. RMI has the technology and expert clinical staff to offer a full range of diagnostic and interventional radiology modalities.
As part of its ambitious expansion plan, RMI acquired three small imaging centers in the mid-Michigan region. It needed access to their images, but did not want to expend the expense or time of migrating them to RMI's own servers. To complicate things, some of the images were stored within an outmoded PACS and could not be accessed using DICOM Query/Retrieve. RMI contracted with DeJarnette to provide query/retrieve and pre-fetch services for their acquired imaging centers.
DeJarnette created XML configuration files that allow Entegra+ to receive order messages (HL7 ORM) from RMI’s RIS/PACS and store the messages in a pre-fetch database. Receiving the messages triggers Entegra+ to make queries directly into the PACS databases of two of the three new acquisitions for prior studies (the third acquisition’s data is in such bad shape as to make it worthless for pre-fetch). Once Entegra+ receives the results of the queries, it schedules pre-fetch of the relevant prior exams.
DeJarnette created another set of XML configuration files that copy prior image files directly from one PACS and issue DICOM C-Move requests to the other PACS. Once it receives the images, Entegra+ updates the patient ID, prepares RMI’s PACS to receive the studies by issuing order messages, and routes the images to the RMI PACS. The XML configuration files also locate reports for each prior exam and send them to the RMI RIS/PACS as HL7 ORU messages.