Collect studies for patient admission

When a patient is admitted to hospital, it is helpful if all relevant studies are immediately available to the clinical staff who are treating the patient.

To collect all the studies, a IBM® Integration Bus message flow is configured to receive an HL7 message, typically an HL7 ADT A01 message from a patient administration system (PAS). A DICOMFindMove node uses the patient identifier from the HL7 message to query DICOM Picture Archiving Communication Systems (PACS), in one or more geographically dispersed locations, to find any studies for that patient. Those studies are then copied to the local PACS in the hospital or clinic where the patient is admitted.

The following diagram shows an example.

1. A patient is admitted to Hospital A and an HL7 ADT A01 message is sent from the PAS to the message flow.
2. The patient ID is extracted from the message and sent to the DICOMFindMove nodes in the message flow.
3. The DICOMFindMove nodes in the message flow are used to send queries to the PACS at Hospital B and Hospital C to locate any Computed Radiography (CR) exams for the patient that were taken in the last year.
4. Matching CR exams from Hospital C are returned to a DICOMInput node in the message flow.
5. By using the DICOMInput node, the images are stored in a file system directory.
6. The exam details (but not the images) are sent through the message flow to a DICOMOutput node.
7. By using the DICOMOutput node, the images are retrieved from the DICOMInput node's processing directory and recombined with data from the message flow.
8. The results are sent to the PACS at Hospital A for the local clinical staff to review.

Note: If the PACS at Hospital C has direct communication with the PACS at Hospital A, then the DICOMFindMove node can be used to initiate the copy of the images from Hospital C directly to Hospital A without sending the images to the message flow.