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ProMedica's new Bay Park Community Hospital sits on a 50 acre site astride the Lucas-Wood County line just west of 1280. The 70 bed hospital opened on November 5, 2001. On August 26, 2002, Mercy Health Partners' newest hospital, St. Anne's, opened at Secor and Sylvania in west Toledo. The radiology departments of both hospitals were designed to be filmless, operating on a digital picture archiving and communication system known as PACS.
Teleradiology itself is not new. What is spurring the implementation of PACS in hospital settings, reports Frost & Sullivan, an international marketing consulting and training company, is the growth of digital imaging modalities: computed tomography, computed radiography, ultrasound, fluoroscopy, angiography. The company estimates that the PACS market amounted to $421 million in 2000 and predicts it will exceed $ 1.1 billion by 2007.
Mercy Health Partners' PACS conversion is part of an overall strategy to improve physician access to information, according to Jim Albin, vice- president/CIO. From day one, St. Anne's was 100 percent filmless, with the exception of mammography. St. Vincent's will have converted by the end of 2002. And St. Charles will be filmless by the first part of ProMedica will install PACS at both Toledo and Flower Hospitals in the next 12 months, reported Tom West, PACS administrator at Bay Park.
Under the old, film-based system, when a patient went to radiology for a procedure, an X-ray cassette was inserted into the piece of equipment. After the procedure, the cassette was brought to a darkroom where the film was taken out, processed, and viewed by a technician. If the image was too dark or too light or if the patient had moved and the image was...