SingHealth to enhance radiology management workflow & patient care

19/06/2009
By Jeremy Koh

SINGAPORE: Singapore's largest healthcare group, SingHealth, is promising better safety and a shorter waiting time for patients as it prepares to establish an integrated radiology management system across its institutions.

The new system by Microsoft, called the Amalga Hospital Information System Radiology Management Solution, will replace two current systems which deal with radiology information and picture archiving.

The group's chief operating officer, Wong Yue Sie, said the new system works by synchronising clinical results and digitised image studies from the current systems.

This allows for the efficient sharing of patients' records and image studies across the SingHealth group.

It also reduces the risk of a mismatch of patients' results and images.

Currently, because staff have to cross-check across two different systems, the group sees some 550 errors per million studies.

Dr Wong said that while not all these errors translate into patient problems, they do require some form of manual intervention to resolve them.

"With this (new system), I now only have to go into the system once. I pull out the patient (information), I will have an immediate matching of the patient's image with the reporting process, so the reports and image and the orders will all be matched into a single record because everything resides in one place. We're looking at an 80 per cent reduction in the number of errors at the system level," said Dr Wong.

The new system will first be implemented this year at the Singapore General Hospital.

And by 2011, it will be rolled out to other SingHealth institutions like the National Cancer Centre and Changi General Hospital.