IMSS RWS Development and Amicas PACS Integration

Amicas PACS Integration

The IMSS RWS was designed and developed by MVI in an effort to give physicians and technicians the ability to write reports, notes and dictations on studies made available via the Amicas PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) system which is used by most modern-day hospitals. The Amicas PACS system collects images and information on patients from many different locations and houses them all together in one centralized location on the IMSS servers.

Besides the main RWS web application which is written in ASP, MVI wrote a data retrieval tool in VB6 which retrieves new studies from the Amicas PACS system and loads them into the RWS database. The data retrieval tool runs once a minute and pulls in new studies via an XML feed published by the Amicas PACS system. Physicians and technicians can then see new studies as they come in and write appropriate reports and recommendations for them. When studies are “viewed”, a special Java-based applet provided by Amicas opens up in the user’s browser which then loads an advanced image manipulation system.  After reviewing the images, the user (physician or technician) can simply press a button to either write a report or enter notes.

The RWS application was just recently overhauled to use MS-SQL 2005 as opposed to the IBM DB2 system it had been using for years.  This was mainly done for stability and flexibility purposes and required an in-depth data migration strategy.  Now that this transition has been completed, the RWS is the best it has ever been and successfully allows patient information to be reviewable by any physician at any location at any time.