Elaborate on the use of DICOM in India?
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Manoj Kumar
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Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM), has revolutionised the practice of Radiology. DICOM has enabled advanced medical imaging applications that has “changed the face of clinical medicine”. From the emergency department, to cardiac stress testing, to breast cancer detection, DICOM is the standard that makes medical imaging work – for doctors and patients.
Ricoh’s DICOM printing solution was showcased during the 5th International conference on Transforming Healthcare with Information Technology – 2014 in Kolkata organised by Apollo Hospitals. The solution drew the attention of many doctors and clinicians present. They appreciated this innovative solution which will help decrease the cost of healthcare, which has always been a major challenge in India.
The DICOM Print Solution offers many advantage as compared to conventional X-Ray Digital printers. There are no consumables (processing kits) to be bought, inventoried, and stored and maintenance required for this solution and no environmental headaches due to chemical processing of the film. Physical storage space needed for the images is far less than for films and low cost solution for generating duplicate copies for insurance, reference and case studies.
How would Ricoh MPC2003SP printer impact the cost of healthcare delivery in India?
One of the major challenges that the Indian diagnostic and healthcare industry faces is high print cost of medical imaging. It is also tedious to manage multiple printing devices for different medical images, and administration of various output sheets like films and papers. This conventional method and its higher running cost forces the diagnostic industry to compromise on the profits in order to ensure the customer retention. Now with Ricoh’s entry to Medical Image Printing, the cost can be reduced by 50 per cent which will help the industry to address the above concerns.
Ricoh DICOM print solution is designed specifically for healthcare sector, to meet the needs of medical image printing across the various departments and not limited to radiology only. Using this solution all medical images from different modalities, like X-ray, CT, MRI, Ultrasound, Cath Lab, Endoscopies etc can be directly printed on plain paper by Ricoh MPC2003SP printer. This coloured printer has been specifically customised for this process to maintain the quality of the print out.
In an era when hospitals are inching towards paper free existence how is your product relevant?
While it is our endeavour to move towards paper less environment, few necessities will always be there. Print out becomes essential when clinicians wants to review the images for diagnosis, to discuss the condition with patient and most importantly the patients will be unsatisfied without a print out of any report.
What is the market that this product will address?
Our solution can be attached to all the medical image equipment that are digital. It will address the need of hospital and diagnostic centres.
What percentage of this market would you be looking at?
Current market is low, however, expanding rapidly. We have developed this solution after lot of R&D and are confident about the quality of our product. Currently, we do not see any competition in India and so far the response has been very good. We have already installed this solution in various large and established healthcare organisation.
What is the cost advantage of using your printer?
The printer can help reduce the cost of printing by 50 per cent. The unique thing about our solution is that the customer has no capital investment in the equipment and no requirement of individual purchases of consumables as Ricoh will be managing the maintenance and supplies during the contract period. We believe that clinicians should use their productive time with patients’ rather managing printing devises, and it should be left to experts
What are the technical requirement for your product? Can it communicate to all imaging products of all brands?
The product used in this solution is MPC 2003, which has been specifically customised for printing medical devises and no other product can be attached to it. However, from the hospitals perspective, we can attach our solution with all the medical modalities without disturbing the existing system. Further, with one solution we can connect various medical imaging devices.