Practical aspects of HIS/PACS integration with emphasis on radiological workflow

Abstract In the PACS that is now being installed for the University Hospitals Leuven, there is a strong emphasis on integration into the overall hospital-wide information system and on supporting interdepartmental workflow. In this paper, we focus on operations within the Radiology Department. We (1) motivate our emphasis on integration, (2) briefly describe our approach to integrating a commercial PACS, (3) situate some of the challenges we were faced with so far, and (4) report on initial experiences. We discuss integration into the overall workflow from the perspective of a changing emphasis in PACS.