We have already discussed the financial and medical advantages of digital over analog archiving. 

The features of the medical CD/DVD systems are numerous.  Beyond serving as a great, inexpensive, robust, accurate, first alternative to film archiving, the system provides a great convenience for your referring clinicians by allowing them to easily port and store their patient?s images.  No more complaints about returning film, films out of order, incomplete folders, or time wasted at the fileroom counter.  This form of media saves you money, time, and resources.

Also, the labeled discs are visually attractive carrying your hospital?s logo - proclaiming to your community that you are a modern radiology department.  These discs will cross the desks of clinicians at other hospitals, making them inquire about your modern service.  The portability of these discs allows your patients and clinicians to carry these disks anywhere and drop them in any PC running Windows and see their images.  This includes their home, office, conference room, laptop, ICU, ER, and OR.  There is no need to create networking to these places to see the images.

These Medical CD/DVD Systems are fully DICOM compatible.  They consolidate a patient's demographics, study information, radiology images and scanned reports and documents on a medical grade CD or DVD.  They are fully automatic and run in the background.  Each CD/DVD includes a feature-filled easy-to-use radiology image viewer that turns an ordinary PC into a clinical review workstation.

In addition to automatically archiving patient studies on CD?s and DVD?s, this is a self-contained image management system.  Its searchable patient database maintains a record of each patient study recorded.  When a patient name is entered, FilmX provides a comprehensive record of all examinations that have been recorded on its system.  It becomes an efficient primary or supplemental back up for both film-based and film-less radiology department or freestanding imaging center.

Each CD or DVD consists of:

1. a medical grade, durable CD or DVD

2. the entirety of the patients study which includes all images labeled in proper order within each series

3. all of the patient demographics included in the DICOM record

4. a DICOM directory allowing images to be ported into other reading programs

5. a fully functional image reviewing program with many typical image manipulation tools.

6. a full color label that includes automatic printing of the patient demographics and study details determined by the user along with optional inclusion of the users hospital logo and relevant text.

Even if you have an online digital storage system, these disks serve as a powerful backup and advertising tool for your department.

Greg Rose, MD, PhD