IMAGE Information Systems Ltd. (IIS) is not only providing its sales partners with high-quality software solutions in the field of Radiology, but also collaborating with several medical imaging companies in order to join efforts and thus enable them to meet the requirements of individual and challenging radiology projects.

In 2010, IIS enjoyed a very successful cooperation with Intechgra Database Solutions Inc. from Eugene, Oregon, USA. KG Intechgra specializes in communications and interface solutions for the Medical Information Technology industry. Together with a leading local radiology group, they developed the web based radiology information system and workflow manager RadManager 2.0.

KG Intechgra had the following requirements for a customer's project:

• A router should be placed between 7 large PACS systems. Occasionally, one of the PACS systems will send a study to the router which needs to be forwarded to the “master PACS” system. The sending system and institution must be easily identifiable through the DICOM header.
  
• The Study Accession Number and the MRN both need to be changed in the DICOM headers before forwarding the images. (The challenge is that the values are contained in an external system database. They are accessed by using the key values contained in the DICOM header received from the external system. The external system is aware of both sets of MRN and Accession Numbers and can therefore easily match them.)
  
• The router should be able to either perform a query against the database, or to route the MRN and Accession Number (accession number would be sufficient) to the other system by file or some other means. The new header values should be provided through the query response, by file or some other means.

Since KG Intechgra's RadManager 2.0 was lacking the DICOM part of those requirements, IMAGE Information Systems cooperated by adding HL7 features to iQ-ROUTER in order to query the master patient index provided by Intechgra.

The resulting router version, iQ-ROUTER PREMIUM, was now able to identify patients and studies, to adjust patient and study identifiers, and thus ensure data consistency between multiple PACS systems.

At the moment, already several large imaging centers in the United States are successfully using RadManager 2.0 and iQ-ROUTER PREMIUM enjoying a smoother and efficient workflow.