The use of Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) in the integration of imaging into the electronic patient record at the Department of Veterans Affairs

The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is using the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard to integrate image data objects from multiple systems for use across the health care enterprise. DICOM uses a structured representation of image data and a communication mechanism that allows the VA to easily acquire images from multiple sources and store them directly into the online patient record. The VA can obtain both radiology and nonradiology images using DICOM, and can display them on low-cost clinican’s color workstations throughout the medical center. High-resolution gray-scale diagnostic-quality multimonitor workstations with specialized viewing software can be used for reading radiology images. The VA’s DICOM capabilities can interface six different commercial picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) and more than 20 different image acquisition modalities. The VA is advancing its use of DICOM beyond radiology. New color imaging applications for gastrointestinal endoscopy and ophthalmology using DICOM are under development. These are the first DICOM offerings for the vendors, who are planning to support the recently passed DICOM Visible Light and Structured Reporting service classes. Implementing these in VistA is a challenge because of the different workflow and software support for these disciplines within the VA hospital information system (HIS) environment.