In Central Region of Denmark, we have just [November 2018] merged Astraia installations and databases from 6 hospitals (5 regional hospitals and 1 university hospital).

The merge process, including more than 850.000 examinations on 175.000 women, took a weekend and went completely smooth, on Monday morning all departments shared the same database and image/video library.

There were immediately several benefits for the women and doctors: Women with suspected anomalies could have their examination reviewed by fetal medicine experts at the university hospital, in several cases referral for second opinion was then not necessary. Review of cases and images is also an excellent educational opportunity for the regional doctors and sonographers, supervised by the university hospital staff.

Planning and preparation of the merge process, including development of algorithms for automated merge and a semiautomatic merging tool, was done by Astraia and Siemens – a cooperation that worked extremely well.

Fetal Medicine Unit, Aarhus University Hospital Skejby is a tertiary referral centre, with 5000 deliveries and about 20.000 obstetric and fetal medicine scans each year. Since 2004, all pregnant women in Denmark have been offered 1st trim combined and 2nd trimester screening. Knowing that would come, in 2003 we decided to setup a fetal database that could perform the 1st trimester risk calculation, and the quality assurance.

astraia could offer the by far best solution (pregnancy and fetal cardiology modules). astraia's staff installed the program on our server and trained the users and technical staff within a few days. The system has been running perfectly since 1st January 2004. Actually, it’s the most stable of the entire hospitals more than 800 production software systems.

Using the program has completely changed our workflow: Now all pregnant women have the double test taken at their GP in week 9 and analyzed within two days. The result of the serum screening is entered at the nuchal scan, and the woman is given the combined risk for Down’s syndrome within 30 minutes. An audit of the 1st trim risk calculation is automatically generated and mailed to FMF, London.

astraia does what many programs claim but few really do: it supports the clinical decision process. At our department all 2nd and 3rd trimester scans are entered as well, thereby giving the clinician an excellent overview of fetal growth and possible signs of fetal compromise. And still it’s very user friendly. All sonongraphers and doctors learned very quickly how to use the program. Therefore we needed significant less time for training than expected.

The quality of the recording of data from clinical evaluations, and the possibility to create reports of performed examinations in Portuguese, were the main reasons for choosing the program. The knowledge of all the work developed, in collaboration with the Center for Fetal Medicine of King`s College Hospital and the Fetal Medicine Foundation influenced our choice.

We started using a fetal database in 1994. In 2002 the astraia programme was installed at Centro Ecográficode Entrecampos with the use of the agenda for patient attendance, patient records and reports of ultrasound examinations and invasive techniques.

The acquisition of the astraia software and the possibility of networking, allows us to raise the quality of our individual work as well as that of the group of professionals in the team. It has been possible to keep checking the quality of our work with the implementation of internal and external audits. The number of examinations performed in 2007 was 11366, 10469 of which were obstetric ultrasound examinations.

Installation date: February 2003, about 20.000 examinations/year

astraia installation changed our workflow:

• Organization of the examinations
• Obligation of all the doctors to fill out the reports
• Use of the same measurement tables
• Presentation of the same type of reports
• Increase of the speed to do the reports