Development of an Electronic Medical Image Archiving System for Health Care in Nigeria

Abstract

Medical images require immediate access by several physicians in different places within a medical facility and access to a critically injured person’s medical image, such as the x-ray, on time can be a key factor in the diagnosis and treatment of the patient. The electronic medical image archive system can help to solve the problem faced in previous physical medium archiving, thus increasing productivity and time which patients are attended to. In this paper, simple but functional electronic medical image archive architecture was proposed and implemented. The system was further evaluated in a hospital setting by medical experts using sample patient image data. Results of the system evaluation shows that electronic medical image archiving systems can actually promote efficiency, quality improvement, provide timely availability of radiologic images, image consultation, and image interpretation in emergent and no emergent clinical care areas among other benefits