Searching and Retrieving Prior Studies from an External Archive

If this feature is configured on your IntelePACS, you can search for patient priors on an external archive that is not indexed by your IntelePACS, and retrieve the study images for viewing in InteleViewer. You can search an external archive for patient priors from the Search tab and the Patient Record tab.

To use this feature, your PACS administrator must enable the Search External Archive user privilege and disable the Restrict Access to DICOM Extern Results in Portals restriction in your user account.

The external archive can be a government health organization archive, such as Dossier Santé Québec (DSQ), or another external DICOM source. Depending on the external archive that is configured on your IntelePACS, you can either search by patient health insurance number, or by patient name and date of birth.

The patient information (patient ID) for a study that you retrieve from an external archive is different from the information that is stored on your IntelePACS for that patient. As a result, the retrieved studies are associated with a different patient on IntelePACS. To view the retrieved prior studies for comparison with the current study in InteleViewer, you must use the candidate patient feature to set the patient that is associated with the retrieved study and the current patient as being the same patient. When you use the candidate patient feature to mark a patient as a candidate patient in the Patient Record tab, relevant studies from the candidate patient appear as relevant in the Studies list for the current study. When the Automated Candidate Patient Selection user preference is enabled, InteleViewer automatically sets candidate patients that meet the minimum confidence level threshold as being the same patient as the current patient.

In order for retrieved studies to appear in the Patient Record tab or Studies list, an HL7 order must be present in IntelePACS for that study. Some external archives, such as Dossier Santé Québec, automatically create and send an HL7 order to IntelePACS when you retrieve studies. If your external archive does not automatically create an HL7 order, ask your PACS administrator to enable the Automatic Order Generation (AOG) feature on your IntelePACS.

To search an external archive for prior studies and retrieve the images:

1. From the Search tab or Patient Record tab, click Search External Archives.

   A web browser window opens.

2. If you click Search External Archives from the Patient Record tab and the required patient information is present in the patient data, the search initiates automatically. Otherwise, enter the patient health insurance number or the patient name and date of birth, and then press enter or click the Search icon .

   Once the query is complete, a list of prior studies appears.

3. To retrieve offline images for a study, click the Offline icon .

   Depending on the number of images to retrieve, the image retrieval process may take some time to complete.

4. Once the images are retrieved, you can view the images in InteleViewer. See Viewing Priors of Patient Candidates.

   If the Patient Record tab for the current study is open before you retrieve the images from the external archive, you must refresh the Patient Record tab for the retrieved studies to appear in the candidate patient list and Studies list.