Desarrollo de un PACS usando código abierto bajo estándar DICOM

The Provincial Health System (Sistema Provincial de Salud, SIPROSA) divides Tucumán in four programmatic areas, where there are public hospitals and Health Primary Attention Centers (Centros de Atención Primaria de Salud, CAPS). The purpose of this structure is to regulate the health care assistance allowing the access to all population. Since 2005 the SIPROSA joined a modernization program of the provincial government computerizing the main hospitals. In this regard, it has been working for almost two years in the implementation of a Computerized Medical Record System. Thus, all patient care information will be dumped in the same public health database. Thereby, through this process it will be possible to access the patient clinical record, medical history, Rx images, medication, programs involved, among other details. To manage digital Medical Imaging in health centers in order to storage, transmit and display medical images, PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) are used. But they are expensive and very difficult to be incorporated in low-resource institutions. In this context, the aim of this work is to develop a DICOMizing PACS, under the DICOM standard, using free software. It was performed a technology assessment to evaluate the software available, network implementation (WLAN, LAN, WADO) in different scenarios, the security of information and new technologies.