iCT Health installs state-of-the-art PACS system at Oman’s Khoula Hospital

iCT Health, the healthcare technology company that provides innovative and powerful life care solutions that transform care delivery, has successfully installed its tightly-integrated web-based Picture Archival and Communications System (PACS) at Oman’s Khoula Hospital.

As of today, the new PACS solution, which is an upgrade of the hospital’s existing PACS system and uses the ‘Sunray iView PACS’ platform developed on service-oriented architecture, will allow staff across the facility to store, retrieve, distribute and present stored images – as well as access and update the hospital’s tightly integrated Al Shifa Hospital Information System and Radiology Information System (HIS-RIS) through voice recognition, with much faster reporting times and with much more accuracy.

The system provides fast performance and high availability during the normal working hours of the hospital and allows the radiologist using the system to store annotations, which can then be retrieved by physicians and other hospital staff. The PACS hardware and storage solutions work in tandem, reducing storage queues which otherwise delay the image retrieval process.

In addition, the system supports the loading of images with an accession number and loads only the requested study image. The radiologist is able to see all historical patient data in comparison mode, including data generated from new and advanced modalities like the hospital’s 64 slice CT scanner, thereby speeding up decision making at the ‘point of care’.

Moreover, the system intelligently and instantly loads the requested image with access to data going back three years, while the administrator is able to correct erroneous patient demographic information from a dedicated quality control console.

“The Ministry of Health (MoH) in Oman, which provides around 80% of the country’s healthcare, is committed to using technology solutions and services that are relevant, efficient and that empower staff members to provide the best possible level of care. For this reason, Oman has been voted as one of the top ten countries for healthcare in the world,”

noted Gautam Dey, CEO, iCT Health.

“Our system enables the Khoula Hospital to optimise its efficiency, while driving down the costs associated with traditional methods of data entry, usage, validation, reconciliation and storage. Furthermore, patients will directly benefit from a better quality, and more convenient level of care,” he added.

In addition to the time and cost saving benefits that the solution brings to the hospital, patients will also benefit from an even safer and more personalised level of healthcare, as the solution will provide staff with access to a patient’s ongoing treatment and case history. Furthermore, the sophisticated system will make it possible to further improve the information available of a patient’s family history and relevant clinical data, by now including the digital imaging data to be accessed and leveraged.

The Khoula Hospital is the Sultanate of Oman’s referral hospital for cases requiring orthopaedic surgery, neurosurgery, cosmetic surgery and burns treatment. The 428 bed hospital also has maternity, gynaecology and physiotherapy departments. It plays a vital role as a tertiary hospital and National Trauma Centre and also serves as a teaching hospital.

Rashid Al Hajiri, director of medical technology, MoH Oman said, “Given the scope and scale of Khoula Hospital’s operations, which treats a large amount of patients each day, having an efficient and accessible PACS system is mission critical for our work as we strive to offer patients the best level of care available. As such, we required a system that would effectively meet our specific requirements, as we seek to improve both our continuum of care and our operational efficiencies, and iCT Health proved to be the ideal partner.”

The system will allow staff using PACS to benefit from 40 terabytes (TB) of storage required to store all of the hospital’s data for the next three years.

iCT Health’s technology offerings are benchmarked to comply with a host of healthcare standards and quality measures. The system in Oman has been delivered in conjunction with Imtac LLC, a leading system integrator in Oman and in partnership with industry leaders like Oracle and HP.

iCT HEALTH and its group entities have been closely associated with the regional healthcare industry for more than 24 years. In the Middle East, more than 100 hospitals have benefited from the company’s deployed solutions. iCT Health currently has clients in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and India and Africa, as well as in the United States of America. The company’s strategic partnerships with global majors including Oracle, Hewlett Packard, CareFusion, Stryker, Hitachi and Gambro, have helped iCT Health imbibe the best practices applicable to the healthcare sector.