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Know thy dose

by Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | March 14, 2013
From the March 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


As copy on Radimetrics’ website – “beyond simple compliance” – makes clear, the goal of these is not so much to increase compliance with the California law in particular, but more to enable clinics or hospitals to make sure equipment is functioning and to enable benchmarking. That is, helping customers monitor and track their dose to see how they stack up against their peers.

Ascendian, which in 2011 began offering “enterprise dose reduction” consulting services, says the pull of these services and programs is three-pronged: dose-lowering is the right thing to do; imaging centers want to stay ahead of lawmakers and lawyers, who might see radiation as a juicy malpractice area; and it’s good for marketing. “Who doesn’t want bragging rights?” Singh asks.

“One exam is easy”
How do these products work? Sectra’s product, called DoseTrack, pulls specific DICOM data from compatible units. The software has been in the works since 2008, well before California’s law was even a thought in some state congressman’s mind. It was developed in part by Matt Nilsson, a professor at Lund University in the southern region of Sweden called Scania, near Denmark.

“Sweden is a very health concerned country,” Sectra President Dr. Torbjörn Kronander tells DOTmed News. “We want a means of collecting and tracking dose records all over the county (Scania), especially for tracking equipment, so we know if equipment should be replaced because it’s giving too much radiation.”

Now employed at nine networked hospitals in Sweden, it’s currently undergoing review by the Food and Drug Administration. A “pioneer” site will set up the service in a few months, but Sectra hasn’t made it public yet.

“It will help hospitals with providing information to patients with how much radiation they got and accumulated over different exams,” Kronander says. “(Capturing) one exam is easy, but this means an institution, a group, can give an accumulated dose recording to a patient.”



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