Brazil’s Prestigious Santa Casa Hospital System Chooses Carestream for a Unified Diagnostic Workflow

São Paulo, May 21 — Santa Casa de Misericordia has selected Carestream to replace its legacy diagnostic workflow technology across all seven of its hospitals in Porto Alegre, the capital and largest city of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.

Santa Casa is the oldest hospital in Rio Grande do Sul, with a rich history of service dating back to 1803. Despite its age, Santa Casa is one of Brazil’s most modern hospital systems, setting the standard in Latin America for patient care, disease prevention, medical research and teaching. Its seven hospitals provide leadership in the fields of internal medicine, general surgery, cardiology, neurosurgery, oncology, pediatrics and transplants. It is also the region’s largest hospital system, with 1,278 beds, 6,765 employees, 1,747 doctors and 80 radiologists.

For all of these reasons — size, scope, quality of care and technical innovation — Carestream’s Clinical Collaboration Platform (video) proved to be the ideal fit. “We needed a comprehensive, future-ready solution to replace our aging systems,” explained Dr. Luciano Hoffman, the hospital’s Head of Diagnostic Imaging. “We spent a year evaluating every major vendor to choose the most capable partner to handle our diagnostic reading workflow from end to end. Carestream was the clear winner.”

When the migration to Carestream is complete, Santa Casa will have a fully integrated platform for its diagnostic imaging needs, consisting of:

  • Vue PACS, enabling accurate and efficient information exchange across the multi-site radiology workflow
  • Vue Archive, providing a vendor-neutral clinical repository
  • Vue RIS, providing a holistic view of each patient to support enhanced treatment decisions
  • Vue Reporting, combining all workflow, visualization and reporting tools into a single web-enabled workspace, with speech recognition for more efficient reporting
  • Vue Motion, an award-winning zero footprint universal viewer that allows viewing, storing and sharing ofpatient imaging exams
  • MyVue patient portal, providing secure patient access to clinical information, exams and reports that fosters active involvement in personal health and wellness; and
  • Vue Beyond, giving hospital administrators real-time insight into key performance indicators to support more effective decision making and quality reporting.

With nearly 6.5 million procedures performed per year and more than 400,000 imaging studies, Santa Casa has intensive requirements for data quality and performance. With its proven, large-scale data migration capabilities, Carestream will transfer 170 terabytes of legacy data to the new platform while ensuring that users can stay productive throughout the process.

“We are looking forward to a long and rewarding partnership with Carestream,” Dr. Hoffman said, “and to a much more collaborative imaging workflow that will keep us at the forefront of quality care.”

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About Santa Casa de Misericordia Hospital
Santa Casa de Misericordia Hospital is a major hospital based in Porto Alegre, Brazil. It is a university hospital that is linked to the UFCSPA, the Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre, and is renowned in Latin America for transplants and genetic research. For more information please visit www.santacasa.org.br.