Six thousand cardiac catheter examinations are conducted annually in the cardiology ward at Elisabeth Hospital in Essen, Germany. To accelerate the examination and diagnosis process, and therefore increase the number of patients that could be examined, the hospital sought to improve their cardiology system. They did this by connecting their radiology information system (RIS) and their picture archiving and communication system (PACS) with their hospital information system (HIS) and cardiology information system (CIS). Prior to the creation of one information technology (IT) system, various IT systems had to be used for each step of the examination process. Patient information had to be gathered and filed in each of these systems separately. This meant that a lot of time was being spent on tedious redundancies. Elisabeth Hospital needed an integrated IT-system and therefore turned to Siemens for aid in the implementation process.

“For our workflow-project we required a service provider like Siemens, who could bring together several systems over efficient interfaces. Even more so, Siemens immersed itself in our established processes and appropriately aligned our IT,” as Frank Kriege, Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Elisabeth Hospital, states. In order to fulfill their requirements of having RIS/PACS as well as HIS and CIS function hand in hand, Siemens carried out the project in two phases. In the first phase, syngo^®Workflow, the RIS component of the syngo Suite, and syngo Imaging, the PACS component, were installed. This phase, which was completed in 2006, provided an integrated system for radiology by combining the RIS with the PACS. Since 2006 the radiology process has been more efficient: the results are in the hands of the radiologists within four hours of the examination. The second phase consisted of implementing and integrating the HIS with the CIS. The implementation process was challenging because it required the integration of four separate systems which are produced by three different manufacturers and used in two different units of the hospital.