Seattle Children’s Hospital (Seattle, Washington) is a prestigious 323-bed hospital and research center that specializes in meeting the physical, emotional and developmental needs of children from infancy through young adulthood. Founded in 1907, Seattle Children’s delivers superior patient care and advances new treatments through pediatric research. They are also the pediatric and adolescent referral center for Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho, and the primary teaching, clinical, and research site for the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
Seattle Children’s contracted with INFINITT North America for the INFINITT Healthcare Platform (IHP) /Vendor Neutral Archiving solution, INFINITT PACS and DoseM, radiation dose management module. In addition, they will use the IHP to archive images for all modalities in Cardiology. As the implementation progresses; Dental, Ophthalmology, and Dermatology images will be added to the archive in a sequential manner. In addition, there are plans to store video data associated with certain inpatient and outpatient procedures.
Adam Kielski, Director, Enterprise Imaging discusses the hospital’s reasons for selecting INFINITT in a phone interview with INA Marketing Manager, Deborah Reed:
Q&A With Adam Kielski
Q: Can you tell us how Seattle Children’s arrived at the decision to contract with INFINITT?
A: Several years ago, I became an advocate for an enterprise approach to image management and archiving, with a centralized archive architecture. We envisioned an archive solution from one vendor, enabling image sharing across Radiology, Cardiology and all of the other “ologies”. In 2013, in preparation for replacing our legacy PACS, we put out an RFI to help us understand the [technology] landscape. Eight companies responded and we narrowed our consideration to two vendors, including INFINITT.
Q: What were the primary criteria for selecting or eliminating vendors from consideration?
A: We were looking for a solution that could address 3 major areas. A common platform for archiving all images generated across the enterprise; a universal viewer that would enable viewing of all content in that archive from any browser-based device, providing easy access for our referring doctors, as well as PACS viewing software that would provide best-of-breed, specialized workflow and analysis tools for the clinical specialties. The INFINITT solution met those criteria. In the final selection we were also looking for configuration flexibility and a proven ability to integrate the PACS bi-directionally with our Cerner EMR. INFINITT stepped up and showed us they could meet our integration requirements.
Q: How much existing data will be migrated to the INFINITT Healthcare Platform, and how do you intend to use Information Lifecycle Management?
A: Initially, we will be migrating 40 Terabytes of Radiology data and 50 Terabytes of Cardiology data. As a pediatric, teaching hospital; our requirements for retention of image data are significantly greater than in an adult-only medical facility. We could potentially have 25 years’ worth of images for a single patient. As far as managing images over the lifecycle, we do not foresee significant purging of studies in the near-term. From a more practical perspective we will use various strategies to reduce the size of clinical video data, and eventually hope to leverage cloud-based storage due to its significant cost advantages.
Q: The INFINITT contract also includes licensing for DoseM. How do you envision that working for you?
A: We plan to track and monitor radiation dose going forward once the system is fully implemented. During the data migration phase of our implementation, we will also gather historical dose data from previous studies as they are being archived to the INFINITT system. In more recent versions of CT, angiography, and fluoroscopy, dose data has been recorded along with the study data. DoseM will enable us to monitor cumulative dose over time, and we intend to leverage existing integration with the ACR Dose Index Registry (DIR) to compare our dosage levels with national and regional norms.