The GO-Kard documentation system

Background

The increasing costs in the health sector result in a stronger consideration of economical aspects in the deployment of procedures in medicine. At the same time, the quality and the documentation of the applied examination procedures is expected to improve. In order to satisfy these conflicting requirements, the automation of routine jobs in hospitals and doctor's practices plays - aside from other aspects, as e. g. the reduction of costs for consumables or the optimization of medical procedures - a decisive role. In this sector, the work of medical staff can significantly be supported and optimized by software which is adequately adjusted to the workflow of an organization.

Project information

With the intention of optimizing the workflow in catheterization laboratories, a close cooperation between the OFFIS computer science institute and the Oldenburg Clinic has been established at the beginning of the 1990s in order to develop a software system for medical documentation in catheterization laboratories. The objective of the implemented Go-Kard software system is to support doctors and medical staff in their daily work. The most important aspects of the system are the following:

• Documentation of diagnostic and therapeutical interventions
• Automated generation of medical letters, reports and statistics
• Acquisition and storage of multimedia-based data
• Visualization of therapies and diagnoses through individual and moving images
• Stock-keeping functionalities
• Provision of data in a network in the sense of a cardiological information system

In this project, I am responsible for all functionalities that are based on the DICOM standard, as e. g. the reception of individual and moving images from a (network) modality (DICOM Storage Service), the transmission of a worklist to a (network) modality (DICOM Worklist Management Service), the reception and storage of examination information (DICOM MPPS Service) and the conversion and storage of images in a corresponding image network. The software that was developed in order to accomplish these tasks was implemented with the necessary help of Microsoft's Visual C++ development environment on a Windows platform. As a database management system, the software makes use of an Oracle database. A detailed and up-to-date description of the entire system can be accessed through the below mentioned link, the following link provides a screenshot of the GO-Kard software system.

Related websites

Homepage of the GO-Kard Project.
http://www.gokard.de/

Website of the OFFIS computer science institute.
http://www.offis.de/

Homepage of the Oldenburg Clinic.
http://www.klinikum-oldenburg.de/