Today I had the opportunity to demo the Codonics Integrity CD importing device. If you haven't seen this device, you can see information on it at the vendor site here.
It is simply a device that looks similar to a Mac Mini if you are familiar with that particular Apple product. There is no keyboard, Mouse or monitor. The operating system and system/DICOM configuration files are kept on a thumb drive that plugs into the back of the integrity. The box itself is nothing more than a CD/DVD reader and an 80GB hard drive.
The beauty of this system is that it can be put anywhere and all a user has to do is stick a DICOM CD/DVD in the drive and after it reads it and stores the images locally, it spits the disc back out for the user to return to the patient. The file-room staff can then navigate to the device via a web browser and reconcile those imported studies to the modality worklist or make manual patient edits as needed and then pushing those studies to PACS.
The device works wonderfully from a clinical perspective offering ease of use and speed. It is in some of the IT aspects of the device where I feel it falls short.
The device does allow you to configure it for DHCP, a nice change in the DICOM world of static TCP/IP configurations and you can join the device to your organizations domain and use DNS for browsing to the device. Where I feel the device comes up short is in the user database. Some may think this is trivial but given the fact that it is a fairly advanced device, it would certainly be beneficial for Active Directory authentication to be a feature of this system. Maintinating disparate user databases on DICOM equipment can be time consuming and tedious so Codonics should consider developing that in a future release.
If you have encountered the Codonics Integrity, have questions about it or would like to post your thoughts about it, visit the discussion forum and let us know.
I will close by saying this is a review and nothing more than that. I have yet to purchase this product or encourage/discourage others to purchase it, I just wanted to share my thoughts after being able to demo the device today.
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