Rotterdam - Philips Medical Systems (Philips), a division of Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE:PHG, AEX:PHI), has officially begun the delivery of its iSite Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) service to the St Franciscus Hospital in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The service lets doctors read studies - including clinical images - from anywhere in the hospital, increasing productivity and the quality of patient care.

The operations of the system will be monitored and managed from the Philips iSite remote control center in San Francisco, North America. The combination of proactive remote monitoring and support allows Philips to identify and correct many potential issues before they impact the user's work in the hospital. The service includes routine work like daily back-ups and routine systems maintenance, which can be performed by Philips without intervention from hospital employees. The locally-based hospital system administrators' tasks are focused around quality control and support of the clinical users.

Philips' iSite is the fastest growing enterprise PACS in Europe. It has been developed by Stentor, a company Philips acquired in 2005. iSite makes filmless image distribution in the hospital possible without the prohibitive up-front capital expenditures associated with traditional PACS. iSite PACS integrates into a health care institution's existing infrastructure and is today used by hundreds of leading hospitals and imaging centers.
The Rotterdam St Franciscus Hospital is pleased with the system because it improves workflow and patient care. Head of Radiology Ruud van der Marel explains: "Philips iSite was designed by clinicians who believe that improved patient care is the most important goal when developing a product. Clinical time should be spent on diagnosis and therapy, not trying to decipher multiple tabs and buttons. All our images are immediately available with the click of the mouse. And because we believe that PACS is life critical, Philips provides a 99.99% uptime guarantee."

Philips' European Healthcare Informatics director Ton van den Hoven commented: "Often frustrated by PACS implementations that take too long to implement and prove too expensive, European hospitals have taken notice of the success of iSite in the US. In Rotterdam we were able to implement iSite in a few months, a timescale which is unheard of for a PACS installation. We can do that because it is a flexible and open system that easily adapts to the existing infrastructure. iSite Enterprise provides clinicians and referring physicians access to instant diagnostic-quality images anytime, anyplace throughout their healthcare environment."

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