IN-HOUSE ACCESS TO PACS IMAGES AND RELATED DATA THROUGH WORLD-WIDE-WEB

The development of a hospital wide PACS is in progress at the Universi ty Hospital of Geneva and several archive modules are operational sinc e 1992. This PACS is intended for wide distribution of images to clini cal wards. As the PACS project and the number of archived images grow rapidly in the hospital, it was necessary to provide an easy, more wid ely accessible and convenient access to the PACS database for the clin icians in the different wards and clinical units of the hospital. An i nnovative solution has been developed using tools such as Netscape nav igator and NCSA World Wide Web server as an alternative to conventiona l database query and retrieval software. These tools present the advan tages of providing a user interface which is the same, independent of the platform being used (e.g. Mac, Windows, UNIX), and an easy integra tion of different types of documents (e.g. text, images). A strict acc ess control has been added to this interface. It allows user identific ation and access rights checking as defined by the in-house hospital i nformation system, before allowing the navigation through patient data records.