ESC Wins Contract to Develop PACS Integrator for Amputee Cases at Walter Reed Army Medical Center

FAIRFAX, VA.— Edmond Scientific, working under subcontract for the Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC), is developing and implementing a set of software and service programs designed to facilitate the integration of medical image data into other text-based data systems, initially for amputee cases.

The contract calls for ESC to develop a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) Integrator, a technologically advanced healthcare IT application designed to facilitate the effective and efficient acquisition, archival, interpretation and dissemination of radiological images within a health enterprise. The PACS integrator will allow images to be distributed electronically and interpreted on computer workstations, thereby eliminating the waiting periods for X-ray images to be processed, analyzed or delivered.

ESC will develop the architecture for the integrator that is compatible with the facility’s Bi-Directional Health Information Exchange (BHIE) architecture, which in turn will facilitate image data sharing with patient information systems at the Veterans Administration.

This project is seen as a first phase effort and will initially involve imaging studies for the urgent need of returning Iraqi war amputee cases and transmitting images from the theater, which is a subset of imaging studies at WRAMC. Other images will include areas such as cardiac applications. However, the software design of the system eventually will be developed to handle all types of medical image information available at WRAMC, to include electronic patient records/electronic medical records (EPR/EMR) in general.