DICOM index tracker enterprise: Advanced system for enterprise-wide quality assurance and patient safety monitoring

DICOM Index Tracker (DIT) is an integrated platform to harvest rich information available from Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) to improve quality assurance in radiology practices. It is designed to capture and maintain longitudinal patient-specific exam indices of interests for all diagnostic and procedural uses of imaging modalities. Thus, it effectively serves as a quality assurance and patient safety monitoring tool. The foundation of DIT is an intelligent database system which stores the information accepted and parsed via a DICOM receiver and parser. The database system enables the basic dosimetry analysis. The success of DIT implementation at Mayo Clinic Arizona calls for the DIT deployment at the enterprise level which requires significant improvements. First, for geographically distributed multi-site implementation, the first bottleneck is the communication (network) delay; the second is the scalability of the DICOM parser to handle the large volume of exams from different sites. To address this issue, DICOM receiver and parser are separated and decentralized by site. To facilitate the enterprise wide Quality Assurance (QA), a notable challenge is the great diversities of manufacturers, modalities and software versions, as the solution DIT Enterprise provides the standardization tool for device naming, protocol naming, physician naming across sites. Thirdly, advanced analytic engines are implemented online which support the proactive QA in DIT Enterprise.