Testimonials
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Pr. Philippe Peetrons
IRIS South Hospitals, Brussels, Belgium
Pr. Philippe Peetrons is Head of Medical Imaging Department at IRIS South Hospitals where they use LMS application for all patients referred for cancer staging or for at risk patients referred for lung nodule diagnosis.
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He explains that such multi-site integration is very beneficial for the patients who must sometimes be treated in a different hospital than the one where the initial diagnostic has been made. “All hospitals of the group have a radiology department, but only one has a medical oncology department. About 25% of cancer patients must move to this hospital to be treated and thanks to MEDIAN LMS centralized data management system, all the lesion information obtained during the initial evaluation and staging is available for follow-up,” he says.
Radiologists also get great benefits from MEDIAN LMS. First, the clinical application itself provides them with computer aided detection (CAD) of lung nodules, repeatable and objective measurement of lesion size and and automatic follow-up. It also generates a standardized report presenting all the quantitative data obtained for each lesion. “LMS application increases the diagnostic and follow-up quality, which is good for the radiologists, and the oncologists love the automatic report that is generated. The whole oncologic follow-up process including the communication between radiologists and oncologists is improved because it is standardized,” Pr. Peetrons says.
The second point is the centralized data management system that allows the radiologists to compare images taken at different hospital, in a totally transparent way. Currently, in many cases during follow-up, radiologists have to re-measure the target lesions on the initial evaluation before measuring them in the follow-up because the initial evaluation was done at another hospital and the lesion data is not available. Pr. Peetrons explains: “With MEDIAN LMS centralized data management system, the radiologists are able to compare images independently from the hospital where they were acquired. The standardized quantitative information is stored so when the patients come for a follow-up, all the radiologists have to do is click on the target lesions and the information is automatically displayed. The LMS application automatically synchronizes the images and finds automatically the target lesions in the follow-up scan. The radiologists just need to double-click on the identified lesion to get access to the quantitative information in the follow-up. LMS then calculates automatically the evolution between the scans and the changes in lesion diameter and/or volume. All this information is then stored on the centralized data management system for further follow-up.”
The centralized data management system is not only useful to compare images of patients that are treated at different locations, but also to allow radiologists working in several hospitals to always get access to their images and data.
According to Pr. Peetrons, the hospital itself gets great benefits because LMS allows it to be a real multi-site organization, not a simple collaboration of some people and services. “At IRIS South Hospitals, the patients can move from one site to another, the clinicians can move, some heavy equipment is not duplicated on all sites but available at one hospital and shared with the others, and all the information regarding the patients is centralized. It is a real multi-site hospital environment sharing all resources and MEDIAN centralized data management system perfectly serves such organization. There are also financial benefits from having just one central database instead of three.”