An Explorative Study on Cooperation among Municipal Corporations

The literature on local government management seldom relates to the issue of collaboration between municipal corporations.This article seeks to contribute to this subject, while projecting the existing knowledge of management of organizations in general to the local municipal sphere in particular. The main aim of the article is to evaluate the preparatory activities required as a preliminary stage for the initiation and promotion of collaboration between municipal corporations. The methodology used is based on quantitative analyze and qualitative ones (Likert scale). We focused on the perceptions of the senior managers of these municipal corporations and found out that defining the managers' resources (time, authority, money, personnel, equipment, ego, and information, skills), ensuring the support of municipality's top management, undergoing early activities of openness to change have positive influence on the managers' perceptions of the importance of collaboration and their willingness to promote it

PACS and Electronic Health Records

Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a major component of the health informatics domain. An important part of the EHR is the medical images obtained over a patient’s lifetime and stored in diverse PACS. The vision presented in this paper is that future medical information systems will convert data from various medical sources – including diverse modalities, PACS, HIS, CIS, RIS, and proprietary systems – to HL7 standard XML documents. Then, the various documents are indexed and compiled to EHRs, upon which complex queries can be posed. We describe the conversion of data retrieved from PACS systems through DICOM to HL7 standard XML documents. This enables the EHR system to answer queries such as “Get all chest images of patients at the age of 20-30, that have blood type ‘A ’ and are allergic to pine trees”, which a single PACS cannot answer. The integration of data from multiple sources makes our approach capable of delivering such answers. It enables the correlation of medical, demographic, clinical, and even genetic information. In addition, by fully indexing all the tagged data in DICOM objects, it becomes possible to offer access to huge amounts of valuable data, which can be better exploited in the specific radiology domain