Company Profile

Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University; St. Louis, Missouri

Business Challenge

Radiology data (16 years of clinical data, 1.5 million patients, 11 million radiology exams, 4 hospitals) stored in an antiquated legacy system (Radiology Information System – IDXrad)

-       IDXrad system is very old and utilizes aged hardware and software technology

-       MUMPs database; VMS operating system

-       Significant reporting limitations

-       No good query tools

-       Data is only understood at a detail level by one application specialist and one programmer

-       Bottleneck for ad-hoc requests

-       Conflicting priorities with other tasks

-       Users can’t access the data, they don’t know what all is available and they don’t know quite how to ask for the data they want

Solution

MOSS Enterprise Search, SQL Server 2005 and BDC were deployed to replicate IDXrad data from the VMS legacy system into a SQL database which was able to be indexed through the BDC by Enterprise Search. Search metadata was exposed through managed properties.

A custom search interface was developed using Enterprise Search components to provide the following additional capabilities:

-       User access logging per HIPAA requirements

-       Dynamically produced exam record with hit highlighting

-       Report integration through SSRS

Benefits

-       Organization is delighted with ability to get to the data

-       IS given opportunity to develop “better” system using state of the art technology

-       Future phases expected

o   Enhance search capabilities

o   Extended mining and dashboarding capabilities