<title>Experience with MUMPS-based DICOM interfaces between the Department of Veterans Affairs HIS/RIS and commercial vendors</title>

The VA has developed a set of DICOM capabilities in MUMPS as an integral part of its hospital/radiology information system (HIS/RIS). DICOM is being used at the VA to transfer text and image data between the HIS/RIS to download patient study information to the commercial medical imaging equipment and to obtain digitized images from them. Our general experience with the commercial DICOM offerings that we have tested has been very favorable. These products were developed using toolkits that are quite mature, and interfacing to them has been fairly easy. The use of DICOM has the potential to reduce costs by allowing open systems solutions consisting of in-house and commercial multi-vendor offerings.