Dr. Vezina Medical Director of NORrad PACS. Photo provided. NORrad PACS News Release ********************** 24x7 Radiology Services for Northern Ontario Additional hub being set up in North Bay It’s 11:45 p.m.
Dr. Vezina Medical Director of NORrad PACS. Photo provided.
NORrad PACS News Release
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24x7 Radiology Services for Northern Ontario Additional hub being set up in North Bay
It’s 11:45 p.m. and a resident of Moose Factory, an island in James Bay in Ontario’s far north, has just been brought to the Emergency Department of the local Weeneebayko General Hospital after being thrown from a snowmobile.
The physician there, concerned about a possible spine injury, shoots a series of x-ray images and calls Dr. Claude Vezina, one of two on-call radiologists at Timmins & District Hospital, more than 300 kilometres to the south. Dr. Vezina takes the call at home and, thanks to the Northern Radiology (NORrad) program, is able to view the x-ray images on his home PC and report that the images are normal and no major injury has been sustained.
“Most hospitals in Ontario’s north have never had radiologists available to them on call and online before, so the only option was to ship x-ray films from location to location, which isn’t always practical when you consider the distance and weather,” explains Dr. Vezina, Medical Director of NORrad PACS.
Using PACS technology and the ONEâ„¢ (Ontario Network for e-Health) Network, a high-speed, high-capacity network provided by Smart Systems for Health Agency (SSHA), Dr. Vezina and his colleague in Timmins can now provide radiology services to Ontario’s northern hospitals on a 24x365 basis.
NORrad is a multi-year project to reshape radiology reporting services in northern Ontario to overcome the immense size of the region, the remoteness of the communities, the weather and the chronic shortage of radiologists. The project uses digital radiology technology and high-speed networks to move diagnostic images (DI) and reports between community and regional hospitals. In Phase 1, which began in 2002, 17 northern hospitals, each with its own local Picture Archiving & Communications System (PACS), were linked to a hub location in Timmins, where diagnostic images from all the hospitals are stored for sharing and back-up purposes.
In the past, our snowmobile accident victim might have been flown to Timmins or Kingston for diagnosis and treatment. With NORrad, a diagnosis can be made within a couple of hours and treatment started locally, so the patient can stay in their own community a benefit to both patient and physician.
“When we look at all the hospitals that have been connected so far, we call it the “Virtual DI Department,” says Dr. Vezina. “The ability for all those institutions to connect instantly for a consultation was never there before; but now, we’re able to provide emergency radiology services for a patient when deemed necessary by the clinicians providing the care.”
Dr. Vezina happily reports that for most emergency consults, he gets to tell the requesting physician that the image is normal; but in some cases, the physician wants to discuss the case further, in which case they are now able to have that in-depth discussion because both of them can view the patient’s image at the same time. For non-emergency cases, where turnaround time on reports used to range from 10 to 21 days, the hospitals can now obtain reports within 24 hours.
In Phase 2, which began in 2007 and will take several years to fully deploy, the Phase 1 NORrad model is being replicated to cover all of northern Ontario. Additional hubs being set up in North Bay, Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay will encompass nearly 40 hospitals, the North Eastern Ontario Regional Cancer Centre and the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. To support the flow of large diagnostic image files, ONE Network will provide the network backbone, with high-bandwidth connections linking all the hospitals to the five hub locations and to two redundant, state-of-the-art DI repositories one in Thunder Bay and one in Sudbury the construction of which is expected to begin early in 2008. There, the next 25-years’ worth of images will be stored for sharing and archival purposes.
“It will only take a small number of radiologists in our hub locations to provide consultation and reporting services covering this vast region,” claims Guy Guindon, Manager, Medical Imaging & Cardiopulmonary Department, NORrad PACS, Timmins & District Hospital, adding that, “A physician anywhere in northern Ontario will be able to quickly and easily retrieve diagnostic images for any resident who presents at any hospital in the north.”
