Integrating Medical Images and Clinical Information

The Heart Institute (InCor) of Sao Paulo has been committed to the goal of integrating all clinical information within the institution. In the last few years, InCor has successfully created a system for transmission, archiving, retrieval, processing and visualization of Medical Images and also a Hospital Information System that stores the administrative and clinical information. These integrated subsystems form InCor's Electronic Patient Record (EPR). This work describes the experience in the effort to develop a functional and comprehensive EPR, which includes access control, lab exams, images (static, dynamic and 3D), clinical reports, documents and even real-time vital signals. Currently, more than 13TB of DICOM images have been stored using the proposed architecture. The EPR stores more than 5 GB/day of integrated data and presents more than 1400 hits per day. The proposed storage subsystem allows six months of visibility for rapid retrieval and more than two years for automatic retrieval using a jukebox.