Cardiobase is used to handle waiting lists, book catheter lab patient appointments, show patient movements and is where cath labs reports are written or stored for department wide access and reporting. Cardiobase sends completed reports to hospital results servers and passes billing details to the hospital accounting system.  Cardiobase integrates well with cath lab systems such as syngo Dynamics, MacLab and other systems to ensure accuracy and timely transmission of reports.

DICOM Worklists

As patient booking are registered in Cardiobase this information can be used to generate a DICOM worklist that can be picked up by various systems in the the cath lab system so that the patient can be selected from a list rather than requiring their identifiers and demographics be entered manually prior to the procedure commencing. This saves time, ensures accuracy and also ensures the results go back to the correct patient record in Cardiobase at the end of the case. 

Cardiobase can then take the feed from the cath lab system, usually as HL7 messages with an embedded PDF (the report), importing them into the correct patient record in Cardiobase. Cardiobase will then forward the report to the hospital results server, i.e. sending an exact copy of the PDF so that it is available to a hospital wide audience, as well as being available in Cardiobase for department use. Cardiobase can import the PDF as sent by cath lab system without modification or import discrete data points with the report then being written in Cardiobase, whichever is preferred. Where necessary, it will also create a patient record and a booking record will be made, for example for an out of hours emergency case where the patient is unknown to Cardiobase. Routinely booked patients already in Cardiobase will have a cath lab record created automatically in Cardiobase to hold the imported PDF report. The Cardiobase records with the imported PDF will be date stamped, will be locked and ‘Completed’. Marking them as ‘Complete’ is the trigger to send them to the results server in the same way that other cardiology reports are sent. This removes the need for printing and manual scanning of reports and makes the reports available to clinicians as soon as the case is completed.

Such integration delivers a number of benefits:

• Removing manual data entry for cath lab patients at the start of cases by loading patient demographics which ensures accuracy and saves staff time via the DICOM server part of the solution.
• Give immediate access to cath lab reports in Cardiobase and the hospital results server
• Saving clinical physiologist’s time at the start of each case by loading patient demographics using the DICOM server whilst ensuring accuracy
• Reducing the risk of manual data entry keying mistakes by removing manual data entry points.
• Improving billing accuracy and completeness.