The Situation
The mission of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office (KCMEO), located at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle Hospital in Seattle, Washington, is to investigate sudden, unexpected, and unnatural deaths in King County. They accomplish this with the highest level of professionalism, compassion, and efficiency, and provide a resource for improving the health and safety of the community consistent with the general mission of Public Health.
Led by Richard Harruff, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Examiner, KCMEO has been continually accredited with the National Association of Medical Examiners since 1978 and brings trained medical evaluation to the investigation of deaths that are of concern to the public health, safety, and welfare of the community.
The Medical Examiner's Office's professional staff of over 30 includes medical examiners (who are medical doctors specializing in the science of forensic pathology), medical investigators, autopsy assistants and administrative support staff.
KCMEO had always stored their patient data on a system at Harborview Medical Center, but in January 2008, KCMEO thought it was more prudent to have their own separate system. Thus KCMEO researched the best companies that could provide PACS server support as well as satisfy their storage needs. They desired a strong, powerful system that was in line with their budget.
The Opportunity
KCMEO performs approximately 2,000 autopsies and about 1,000 x-rays per year and wanted a reliable and efficient PACS to support their workload.
KCMEO liked Candelis’ ImageGrid because it was a scalable on-premise and cloud image archiving solution, which could grow with their practice. Moreover, they were very pleased with the fantastic Candelis customer support service.
“We use King County’s servers and King County runs our IT. It was imperative that we have our own storage system so that we can manage our own files to avoid any possible delays,” says Dr. Harruff.
The Solution
KCMEO chose the Candelis’ ImageGrid solution because of its ease of use, range of advanced functionality, reliability, and competitive pricing. They also purchased radiology viewers so that their multiple staff members could access and view images.
In 2016, KCMEO was so happy with their Candelis ImageGrid system that they upgraded their ImageGrid. With the new ImageGrid, they added ASTRA cloud storage subscription to capitalize on ASTRA Cloud's visualization tools, seamless collaboration, backup and disaster recovery, and security features.
“We are very pleased with the Candelis ImageGrid as it has allowed us to be independent of Harborview’s IT and systems. Now that we have our own storage system, we can be a more efficient and productive office,” says Dr. Harruff.
The Results
The partnership with Candelis has provided KCMEO with a PACS that is both technically and financially scalable. Candelis ImageGrid’s robust features and worklist functionality offers an easy solution to support their facility.
Moreover, the Candelis customer support team’s responsiveness is a welcome bonus to the overall efficiency of their system.
“We’ve always had good support with Candelis. The tech support team worked tirelessly to help us arrange a means to send our images to Seattle Hospital so that their radiologists could read our x-rays,” added Dr. Harruff.
“Because of all the steps that must be taken, doing things with the County can often be difficult and tedious, but Candelis was very patient with the installation and all the circuitous connections that had to be achieved,” added Dr. Harruff.
“We have been very pleased with our Candelis system – our server works seamlessly and the customer support is very satisfying,” added Dr. Harruff.
