Health Care Agency gets $1m radiology information system |30 January 2020
The newly acquired medical imaging technology will provide support to physicians to better diagnose and provide better treatment outcomes (Photo: Thomas Meriton)
With the aim of upgrading the medical radiology image network, improve medical radiology reporting and facilitating access to radiology medical images by clinicians at peripherals, the Health Care Agency has received an upgraded state of the art Radiology Information System (RIS) PACS from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
A radiological information system (RIS) is the core system for the electronic management of imaging departments and it supports the following features – patient registration and scheduling, patient list management, modality interface using worklists, workflow management within a department of radiology and request and document scanning among others.
PACS, or picture archiving and communication system, is a medical imaging technology for different radiology modalities. This system helps to store, retrieve, present and share radiology images from various medical hardware modalities, such as X-ray, CT scan, MRI and ultrasound machines.
Therefore, the newly acquired modern and upgraded software and hardware medical imaging technology, which has cost $1 million, displays, processes, reads, reports, communicates, distributes stores and archives digital medical images, hence providing support to physicians to better diagnose and provide better treatment outcomes.
The RIS PACS information network, which took over six months to install, is a donation from His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, to support the health sector in Seychelles, within the framework of His Highness’s humanitarian initiatives at regional and global level. Installation and configuration for the service of RIS PACS at the Seychelles Diagnostic center was done by Siemens Healthcare LLC, UAE.
It was the UAE ambassador to Seychelles, Ahmed Saeed Alneyadi, who presided over the commissioning of the new state of the art medical software and hardware imaging system during a presentation on the new technology held at the Ministry of Health yesterday by the consultant radiologist in charge, Dr Olena Kovalska. Present were Minister Jean-Paul Adam, the chief executive of the Health Care Agency, Dr Danny Louange, his deputy, Kathleen Cecile, the special advisor to the Minister, Dr Laurence Reginald and technicians from the Department of Information Communication Technology (DICT) who also worked on the installation of the Radiology Information System.
In a brief speech for the occasion, Ambassador Alneyadi said His Highness bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s humanitarian initiatives are aimed at providing assistance to countries and societies that need medical services and medical capabilities to confront and overcome diseases that threaten development, progress and stability in the world.
He noted that through the collaboration of both governments, the RIS PACS is yet another milestone in the development and the upgrading of the health care in Seychelles thus providing people with safe and efficient radiology service of high quality which will operate efficiently 24-hours, 7-days a week.
For his part, Minister Adam thanked His Highness bin Zayed Al Nahyan and the people of UAE, through Ambassador Alneyadi, for the milestone contribution to the government of Seychelles.
He hailed past and recent generous supports in terms of medical experts and specialists, training, among others, by the UAE, and furthermore the good relationship and partnership in the health sector among others, between the two countries.
Minister Adam further said that the new upgraded information medical system forms part of the digitalisation of the ministry’s information system and he noted that the UAE is our consistent partner in terms of modernisation of our health system and taking us to new levels thus allowing the ministry to offer the highest quality of service.
Dr Louange said that the diagnostic centre was first equipped with a RIS PACS in 2010 from a donation by the Sheikh Khalifa Foundation and the upgrade on the system was necessary at this point in time as the past system fell short in capacity to meet the number of patients in need of the service.
Fully operational and running on two main servers based at the Sheikh Khalifa Diagnostic Centre, the RIS PACS has been upgraded from the 2012 windows system to that of the 2016 windows with a memory ram of 32GB compared to the previous memory ram 6GB. It thus can store images for a five-year period and all images from 2010 onwards have already been transferred in the new system. It has a back up of up to 70 Tera Byte from the previous 2 Tera Byte.
The new version of the upgraded RIS PACS system will be inter-connected with all hospitals, clinics and health centres on Mahé, Praslin and La Digue where more doctors, instead of the usual 30 of them, will be able to share high definition 3D images and medical reports at the same time on their computers. It also comes with new equipment and licenses for new working stations – ten in all as compared to only three working stations in the past – for specialists to diagnose and handle medical reports.
Patrick Joubert
