Disc Recorder Helps Hospitals Save Costs, Increase Speed and Efficiency

A new disc recording system is helping to push the nuclear medicine department out of the realm of time-consuming manual compact disc (CD) recording and into an environment of increased efficiency.

In many nuclear medicine departments, essential processes and their resulting costs are reducing overall staff efficiency. At Inselspital University Hospital (Bern, Switzerland), an innovative new medical disc publisher is solving these problems.

With the Virtua Medical Disc Publisher, radiologists who once had to leave their workstations when technologists needed to record a CD are now able to continue their clinical work without interruption. Moreover, technologists can burn discs in a matter of seconds compared with a process that once required up to 15 minutes.

The Virtua Medical Disc Publisher is marketed by Codonics, Inc. (Middleburg Heights, OH, USA), a global supplier of dry diagnostic medical imagers and CD/DVD disc publishers. Before Virtua was implemented, the department used an elementary process to record images on CDs from a workstation, much like consumers using a conventional personal computer (PC). The process was an involved one, quality was inconsistent, and CDs frequently failed to record data at all. Furthermore, discs had to be recorded individually. When requests came in to duplicate a disc that had previously been recorded, the process had to be initiated all over again.

Most CDs are recorded for referring physicians, who can view them with ease when necessary, easily maintain them in the patient record, and send them to specialists without difficulty. Now with Virtua, the disc is the primary illustration of the report, and the hardcopy is a complement.

With the new recorder, radiologists have gained back the time that they lost when CDs were recording, technologists have recovered several hours of exam time per day, Virtua never fails to record data, and the cost savings has been significant; the department is saving more than US$15,000 per year using Virtua. In addition to the speed they were looking for, the department needed to send data from its own PET/CT workstation. That required a viewer that would allow the viewing of fused pre-registered data. Codonics representatives in Switzerland configured Inselspital's Siemens Healthcare (Erlangen, Germany) Biograph PET/CT and installed a Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine- (DICOM)-compatible viewer that enables clinicians to read nuclear medicine studies as well as data from the department's PET/CT and SPECT/CT systems.

Virtua's features and capabilities include fast, on-demand recording and labeling, compatibility with datasets from virtually all modalities, fully automatic operation right from modality workstations, and a compact footprint. Virtua's compact, all-in-one design and touch screen eliminate the mess of disorganized cables and a separate monitor, keyboard and mouse. A ‘direct to disc' feature, which Inselspital hopes to implement, will enable recording of PowerPoint presentations along with images and other non-DICOM files for distribution at medical conferences.

At Inselspital, the staff is able to record entire studies onto one or two CDs, or if they wish, could record to one DVD. Two CDs may be recorded simultaneously, which enables the department to record all of its CDs for an entire day in one hour. Using its former manual process, up to four hours were required to complete the same number of CDs.


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Inselspital University Hospital
Codonics