Our Work “Towards an Interoperable and Standards-Based Medical Imaging Platform in Public Health Facilities in Zambia” Accepted to Zambia Digital Health Conference 2022

Our submission to Zambia Digital Health Conference 2022, titled “Enterprise Medical Imaging for Improved Radiological Workflows: Towards an Interoperable and Standards-Based Medical Imaging Platform in Public Health Facilities in Zambia” has been accepted and will be presented during the upcoming Zambia Digital Health Conference 2022 conference.

We have been working with collaborators from the University Teaching Hospitals (UTHs)’s Adult Hospital in order to explore the potential of using Enterprise Medical Imaging to address some of the grand challenges affecting radiological diagnosis [1]. This work, in particular, presents on-going work being conducted to set up an nation-wide interoperable and standards-based Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) platform to enable Radiologist to effectively and efficiently access Medical Images.

The paper presents a situation analysis conducted to understand how Medical Images are currently stored, managed and accessse and, additionaly, preliminary requirements required to build a PACS platform. Furthermore, the paper provides an outline of a prototype PACS platform implemented using the free and open source PACS platform Dicoogle [2].

The Zambia Digital Health Conference 2022 will be hosted by the Government of the Republic of Zambia through the Ministry of Health. The event will be held in October 2022 and will server as an avenue to highlight the recently developed Zambia Digital Health Strategy [3].

Bibiliography
[1] Zulu, E. O., & Phiri, L. (2022). Enterprise Medical Imaging in the Global South: Challenges and Opportunities. In M. Cunningham & P. Cunningham (Eds.), 2022 IST-Africa Conference (IST-Africa) (pp. 1–9). IEEE.
[2] Lebre, R., Pinho, E., Silva, J. M., & Costa, C. (2020, October). Dicoogle Framework for Medical Imaging Teaching and Research. 25th IEEE International Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC). IEEE International Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC), Rennes, France. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISCC50000.2020.9219545
[3] Ministry of Health. (2022). Digital Health Strategy 2022-2026. Retrieved October 14, 2022, from https://www.moh.gov.zm/?wpfb_dl=145