6th ESACP Congress, Heidelberg, April 7-11, 1999

A123
HISTKOM - AN INTEGRATED SOLUTION FOR TELEPATHOLOGY
Schwarzmann P, Binder B, Käser M, Klose R

Inst. Physikalische Elektronik der Univserität Stuttgart, Germany

The application of different telepathology procedures appears now gradually in medical practice. To improve health care and to gain economical savings requires system solutions with the full exploitation of telepathology possibilities promoting the formation of telepathology networks with participants offering and requesting services in pathology. The HISTKOM family of telepathology equipment and software includes now all components of such a network: - HISTKOM - Telemicroscopy: equipment to perform frozen section service - HISTKOM - Teleconsult: equipment to carry out "store and forward" as well as interactive 2nd opinion cooperation. - HISTKOM - Network: Secure Intranet within the public ISDN telephone net with access, identification, authorization, and encryption by chip-card technology. - HISTKOM - Electronic Investigation document: common data interchange format containing text, graphics and images for documentation, archiving and electronic mailing which is common to all documents. Open interfaces to the mentioned investigation protocol provide means to integrate it via software interfaces to existing hospital information systems (HIS). A second interface provides a translation of the document to the HTML format of the "World Wide Web". Under the restrictions of a reduced data confidentiality, this document can be sent over the Internet to everybody connected to it. The HTML document can be read with every standard browser, no special software is necessary. The intention to install such networks implies that all system components be evaluated thoroughly. This has been done and is continued with selected partners in a three years fieldtest period. The evaluation was with respect to comfort of application, image quality, quality of diagnoses and naturally technical safety. Fieldtests have been carried out with material from histology, cytology and hematology. The outcome of all tests (about 12 with about 1000 cases) revealed that image quality and comfort of operation is well accepted by the users; the diagnoses rendered with telepathology equipment were comparable to those rendered with the microscope directly; the training period for the new tool can be restricted to some 20 specimens.