Integrating medical images into hospital information systems

The effective delivery of health care has become increasingly dependent on a wide range of medical data that includes a variety of images. Manual and computer-based medical records ordinarily do not contain image data, leaving the physician to deal with a fragmented patient record widely scattered throughout the hospital. The Department of Veterans Affairs is currently installing a prototype hospital information system workstation network to demonstrate the feasibility of providing image management and communications functionality as an integral part of an existing hospital information system. The core of this system is a data base management system adapted to handle images as a new data type. A general model for this network-based integration is discussed and various alternative architectures are examined.