Kickapoo Indian Health Center Update

InTelemed and Carestream Health is nearly complete with the PACS and CR implementation at Kickapoo Indian Health Center in McLoud, OK. The Kodak CR-825 was installed several weeks ago so that Dianne VanCuren, the Radiology Director, and her staff were able to gain experience with the CR prior to the PACS installation.

"Learning CR was easier than I expected" said Dianne. "It gave us a chance to feel comfortable with CR before proceeding to PACS."

Networking

Last week the PACS server and HL7 broker was installed. This was the most complex part. The Health Center had a clinical network that was going to be seperate, yet would be connected to the new radiology network. InTelemed installed a gigagit switch for radiology in the computer room at Kickapoo so that the the radiology network would be lightning fast when displaying images. We also installed a Sonicwall TZ-180 firewall to connect the radiology network to a DLS line provided by McLoud Telephone. This provided a dedicated Internet line for radiology that would not be impacted by the load on the clinical network. "We don't want the image load to impact the clinical network" said Billy Copeland, Information Systems Director.

Even though the networks were isolated, they still need to be connected so that users of the RPMS system - the patient tracking programs used by host Indian Health Service affiliated clinics - still needed the ability to see images on the PACS network. In addition, the PACS HL7 broker needed to communicate with the RPMS server to receive patient information and reports. So to isolate yet connect the networks, InTelemed set up the Sonicwall firewall so that all traffic going between the radiology LAN to the clinical LAN had to pass through the firewall. This gave us much better control of this traffic and we would only allow necessary traffic between particular users and applications. Any hackers or viruses that found their way onto one network would be restricted from affecting the other network. The end result was that the Sonicwall firewall was used to not only control and protect the private networks from the public Internet, but also to protect the two internal networks from each other.

Kickapoo clinical and radiology network is seperated by firewall