Software Improves Patient Care by Enabling Instant Collaboration Among Radiologists and their Referral Community

With new combined technology, medical professionals will be able to find medical specialists quickly based on location and topic, and collaborate instantly through instant messaging or a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) conversation.

Carestream Health, Inc. (Rochester, NY, USA), announced an agreement to integrate and market a key component of the IBM (Armonk, NY, USA) Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC2) platform--IBM Lotus Sametime. The combination of Lotus Sametime software and Carestream Health's radiology systems will facilitate rapid communication, including instant messaging and VoIP interactions between radiologists and other medical professionals involved in the diagnosis and treatment of patients.

The quality of patient care can be adversely affected by delayed communication or the inability to immediately collaborate with the right experts at the right time. Incorporating communications and collaboration capabilities into routine work processes for medical professionals can improve the speed and efficiency of diagnosis, resulting in faster results and treatment plans for patients.

Furthermore, users can share computer screens in real time, highlighting key parts of an image to collaborate on a diagnosis. For example, if a radiologist determines that urgent care is required, he or she can immediately contact the referring physician to communicate critical results. By clicking on the referring physician's name--which appears within the application--they can begin an instant messaging dialog or initiate a VoIP call. If additional opinions are needed, colleagues can quickly be added to a VoIP conference call.

This software helps promote collaborative patient care that transcends organizational and geographic boundaries by incorporating the physician referral community into the overall radiology workflow. The integration with Lotus Sametime software will involve Carestream Health's range of radiology systems including: Carestream RIS (radiology information system), a workflow, scheduling, and information solution for radiology departments; Carestream PACS (picture archiving and communications system), an electronic system used for management, viewing, sharing, and storage of all radiology imaging studies; and the Kodak Carestream Digital Dashboard, which provides system administrators with a convenient way to proactively monitor equipment performance, storage utilization and user volumes.

Representatives from Carestream Health will begin marketing, installing, and supporting this new tool worldwide--available on new and previously purchased systems from Carestream Health--in the second quarter of 2008.

Carestream radiology systems address the diverse operational needs of clinics, imaging centers, hospitals, and healthcare networks, including orthopedic, mammography, and oncology facilities.


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