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Physicians don't spend a lot of time thinking about diagnostic storage strategies. But they do want tools to get to the held images and reports quickly and easily, says Stuart Seides, M.D., associate director of cardiology at the Washington Heart and Vascular Institute at Washington (D.C.) Hospital Center.

"The clinician who is dependent upon clinical images wants rapid access in one place," he contends. "You want to call up images on a patient regardless of the modality used and you want to be able to do it wherever you are in the institution."

Washington Hospital Center is where the Azyxxi data integration and aggregation software was developed before Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. bought the technology in 2006, refined it and now sells it as Amalga.

And one of the uses of Amalga at the hospital is to make diagnostic images and other patient data easily available to clinicians. "If I go on a nursing unit, I can log onto Amalga and can find the patient in question and call up their file," Seides explains. That file will have all imaging studies on the patient, as well as laboratory, microbiology and serumlogy results, among other data.

Until a few years ago, cardiologists and other physicians at the hospital didn't have such ready access to diagnostic images. The facility has several coronary care units and a coronary intensive care unit. Physicians had to first visit the radiology department to get film pulled-if the film wasn't already checked out-before going on rounds. "A very sizable chunk of your day was spent running around looking at films," Seides recalls.

Now, the images are digital and available on workstations across the hospital. That's improved the timeliness and quality of care, he adds. "When you work in a field like mine, you need to actually see the images. The ability to integrate all that information once you are at the bedside is extraordinarily efficient."

The resolution of images accessed on workstations via Amalga is not as high as images accessed from a disk. But the resolution is high enough to "not lose any ability to make a diagnosis," Seides says. "There's no question resolution is higher off an optical disk, but the resolution off Amalga is good enough. For day-to-day clinical work, Amalga does just fine. Its resolution is good and it is available universally. The compromise is a very, very good one."

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