Development and implementation of a secure, integrated management system for medical images and electronic clinical records for small hospitals.

The field of Medical Informatics is currently experiencing increasing demands for new models of the Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) protocols. Despite of the considerable advantages of current systems, implementation in hospitals is remarkably slow, due primarily to difficulties in integration and relatively high costs. Even though the success of DICOM standards has greatly contributed to the development of PACS, many hospitals remain unable to support it or to make full use of its potential because various imaging modalities in use at these sites generate images that cannot be stored in the PACS and cannot be managed in a centralized manner without DICOM standardization modules.