Kestral and Philips Healthcare have recently joined forces installing Karisma RIS  and Philips iSite PACS into the Medical Imaging department at  St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney.

St Vincent’s Medical Imaging department is a busy inner city department catering to the needs of the local community. Most of the 85,000 studies per year are generated from hospital inpatients', outpatient and emergency departments, as well as meeting the needs of the local GP’s and specialists.    

St Vincent’s offers an extensive range of diagnostic services focusing on angiography, ultrasound, CT, MRI, general x-ray, OPG, interventional procedures and fluoroscopy.  In addition, the department collaborates with a number of universities offering  an extensive teaching  program for Radiologists and Medical Imaging Technologists , as well as many research studies.

The RIS project began in January with a workflow review undertaken with different craft groups assigned to the project .  By mid-May all aspects of system configuration  were complete,  allowing enough time for end user training and meeting the end of May go-live objective.  During this period, St Vincent’s key users participated in an extensive system implementation training course, collated key data required to populate Karisma and tested the newly configured Karisma functionality. The St Vincent's team worked closely with the Kestral technical team to establish a Karisma workflow suitable to the needs of the department. 

Previously St Vincent’s was using different non-integrated systems to manage the workflow of the department. This created a good deal of frustration due to the inability of each system to integrate with the others.  The deployment of the Karisma RIS integrated to the Philips iSite PACS has created a seamless, efficient workflow for all members of the Imaging department. 

The concept of a single RIS/PACS system to perform all tasks was quite foreign to most of the St Vincent staff but, after just a couple of days use, the benefits were obvious. In the coming months, St Vincent’s hopes to see even greater efficiency and productivity improvements to the department.

The Kestral project team would like to thank Ms Pat Buick, Medical Imaging manager and her staff; in particular Anthony and Jon. In addition, thanks must go to St Vincent’s IT department and Philips Healthcare for their hard work and dedication during the implementation process. Without the tireless staff at St Vincent’s, implementation would not have proceeded as smoothly as it did. 

Pat Buick tells us that the staff very impressed with Karisma RIS;

 “The staff are still smiling, as they love the new RIS.”

Kestral look forward to continuing our relationship with St Vincent’s Hospital and our assured provision of support and value to the organisation.