Filmless radiology at Brooke Army Medical Center

The hospital at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas has an essentially filmless radiology department. Mammography is one of the few services still using film. The radiology department at Brooke takes advantage of a very capable Lockheed Martin PACS to achieve the filmless operation. The old hospital has been replaced by a new hospital, the new Brooke Army Medical Center. As a basis for predictions of activity at new Brooke, the activities at the old Brooke Army Medical Center were examined. The heart of the PACS at Brooke is the image server with an associated database. The image server has the performance required to keep the radiologist from returning to film for diagnosis. A directly connected workstation can present a full screen of images in less than two seconds, even during the busiest hour of the day for this large hospital. In addition the database is used to organize the workflow for the radiology examinations through the hospital. Information about the activity at the new Brooke hospital is used to predict the utilization of the short term storage and the long term storage. In particular, the time that an examination will be retained on the new Brooke short term storage is measured. The Brooke medical complex generates 384.8 exams per day on a typical weekday. The number of exams on a weekend is 40 percent of the exams on the weekday. The storage required is 18.3 gigabytes per day in the short term storage of the Image Storage Unit (ISU) and 9.7 gigabytes per day in the archive. The 256 gigabytes of the ISU will hold 11.7 weeks or about 2.5 months of exams. The archive will hold four years of exams in tow jukeboxes. A working year will have an effective 300 days of equivalent weekday radiology load. By ten years from now the hospital complex can be expected to handle to load that is estimated to be about 160 percent of the current load. With the changes in the storage of disks and archive media that will have occurred by that time, the number of weeks of storage will be greater than that held now.