Breach Candy Hospital goes for PACS Shopping

For over 50 years the Breach Candy Hospital Trust, has been a beacon of light for the suffering. Situated on the coastline of South Mumbai, the 173 bedded hospital is renowned for its medical expertise, excellent nursing care and quality diagnostics. Specialists on the hospital's panel of doctors include some of the most distinguished names in Indian medical profession. Many procedures in routine use including Coronary Angioplasty, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Critical Care ICU and Hysteroscopy were first performed here. The hospital has earned national recognition as a leader in interventional cardiology.

After understanding the exact requirement of Hospital, SoftLink decided to install C-PACS solution connecting to Cathlab with approximately one year of on-line storage on a high-end RAID L5 server for totally storage and security of Patient Images. The solution will create a centralized archive for the entire department.

Enterprise DICOM Workstations will be strategically placed across the hospital to increase physicians' access to patient data and improve the workflow for the operation. The solution will significantly improve capability for consultation. In addition to rapidly accessible, high-quality visual images, Quality Control tolls can potentially provide a more accurate diagnosis of the disease and cost savings by decreasing the amount of devices used on interventional cases.

SoftLink’s C-PACS architecture is highly scalable, allowing hospitals to start with a single-lab solution and move to multi-center and multi-modality network based solutions over a period of time. The solution supports other imaging modalities such as electro physiology and vascular labs, cardiac CT, Color Dopplers, 2-D/3-D Echo making it a “ONE Stop” solution for image archival, storage and review for the hospital!

The simultaneous review of patient images from multiple modalities, in multiple windows positions the cardiologist to make a better diagnosis as he has 360 degree view of all the diagnostic images of a patient on ONE screen!

Patients connecting with physicians via social media

While some physicians may dread the idea, patients are increasingly eager to connect with them via social media. Increasingly, patients are seeing this as a way around the limitations of traditional practice models, which include limited hours and playing phone tag with doctors.

"Friending" doctors on Facebook and the like is a natural, and probably unavoidable, outgrowth of existing trends, experts note. After all, according to one study by Manhattan Research of 9,000-odd U.S. adults, 5 percent of respondents had sent or received an email message to a doctor, and 49 percent wanted to do so in the future. And these days, social networking is a short step up from email.

When patients connect with doctors online, some have focused on getting routine chores done, such as prescription refills and having health questions answered. But others have gone as far as sending important messages--such as requests for help with serious issues--directly to their doctor via Facebook. In some cases, when they're dealing with e-friendly physicians, they've gotten quicker answers that way