Wireless and PDA: a novel strategy to access DICOM-compliant medical data on mobile devices

The medical procedures at the patient bedside are out of the scope of current HIS/RIS systems, which means that patient record and image data access during the medical visit or the execution, recording and confirmation of the medicine prescriptions, still do not enjoy computerized support. As a consequence, the necessary inclusion of new data to the patient record, still needs to be carried out through notations on paper and later typed, causes delays on the availability of this information (Mobile computing in a hospital: the Ward-In-Hand project. SAC 2000-ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Março, 2000, Villa Olmo, Como, Italy). This paper presents a software technology where the medical and nursing staff will be equipped with a handheld computer connected by radio to a central server that provides access to the electronic patient records and that will actively inform about tasks pending distribution. The server acts as a database for multimodal electronic patient record information, storing patient data from computerized tomography (CT), ultrasonography (US), magnetic resonance (MRI) images and also medical findings, observations and prescriptions coded as DICOM Structured Reports (Digital Image and Communications in Medicine). The prototype described in this article implements a medical images and structured reports server that makes the search and recovery of data stored in the DICOM standard possible.