Mammography medical facilities generate thousands of patient images every year. Those images must be properly stored for seven to ten years to be in compliance with HIPPA regulations. Because of this, storage of patient images is a major issue for all medical offices, including those that specialize in mammography. For these reasons, many mammography providers are utilizing the digital power that comes with pacs workstations. When used with a mammography viewer, authorized medical staff can view, distribute and store those digital images quickly and easily.
Digital images are easy to store using pacs workstations. They take up only as much space as a computer's server does, decreasing the need for costly storage rooms. Archiving is also much easier to accomplish when using a mammography workstation
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Images that have been digitized can also be enhanced when used with a mammography workstation. Brightness and contrast, among many other features, can be increased or decreased as needed with a mammography viewer, to offer a better look and more accurate diagnosis. Because the mammography viewer is used as part of an online system, it allows immediate access to patient digital images, speeding up retrieval time and minimizing misplaced patient images. Images can be placed on the mammography viewer simultaneously, so you can compare and contract current images with earlier ones for better diagnoses.
Because the images are in a digital online format, security is in place on every mammography workstation. Secure transmition over local area networks, wide area networks or a virtual private network are all possible with appropriate software in use with a mammography viewer.
Patient images can be sent to and from pacs workstations. Instead of physically walking or mailing digital images, all one needs to do is click the mouse, and the digital image is immediately sent to specific radiologists that you select. The mammography workstation software can be set up so that digital patient images can be automatically sent to reading physicians anywhere in your hospital or to a medical facility anywhere in the world with Internet access and the appropriate software. The digital images are just as quickly and easily sent to storage when using pacs workstations. This is also an important consideration for compliance with HIPPA regulations, because offsite archiving is needed.
In short, these types of pacs workstations can optimize your medical facility productivity by offering a full range of storage and retrieval capabilities, the ability to see multiple studies side by side, fast retrieval times and the ability to enable multiple concurrent users maximum efficiency and ease of use.
Wayne Hemrick writes about the advent of future technology. In this article he writes about the mammography workstation.