I use DCM4Chee to receive the DICOM from the equipments. All fine, DCM4Chee is a great software.
I now would like to send the patient data in advance to the equipment, so that the patient data is prefilled when the doctor or technician starts the examination.
I am not sure of how it works.
Should I send a kind of DICOM message with no image data to the equipment? Using dcmsnd utility, or something else?
I use the pacsdb database, and am able to create patient data. I think I will be able to create study data to be sent to the equipment, but how should I send this information to the equipment.
Ideas and examples are welcome :D.
Answer conclusion: The way to go i sing the Modality Worklist from DCM4CHEE, populating it using HL7 messages.
Interesting links:
Just to expand a bit on the topic.
The feature You are looking for is indeed Modality Worklist or MWL for short. It is a service, that dcm4chee server can provide and the modality (imaging equipment) has to be setup to query the service for worklist entries.
However there is another side to it - getting the orders in to dcm4chee. This is usually done by sending HL7 order messages from a HIS or RIS to dcm4chee. I don't see a way to manually input worklist entries into dcm4chee. This would also not be a very useful feature, since it would just shift the manual typing work from the modality to dcm4chee administration panel. In the HIS/RIS there should usually be all the relevant information already available and it's just a matter of configuring the HL7 messages to sent. (If Your HIS/RIS does support HL7 messaging. Could be, that it doesn't have support for that, if it has not been needed before and is a custom built in-house system or something)
So in short - You need to get orders in HL7 format into dcm4chee and then they will be available in worklist to be queried by a modality. The HL7 part might actually be the more difficult part.