Why Waitaha Canterbury chooses EIZO’s RadiNET Pro for radiology QA

Waitaha Canterbury, the second-largest healthcare provider in New Zealand, serves over half a million people in the country’s South Island. Ensuring accurate, reliable imaging is critical to ensuring the health of 12% of the country’s population.

As part of Te Whatu Ora (Health New Zealand), Waitaha Canterbury has partnered with EIZO for nearly two decades to maintain the stringent medical imaging standards set by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists (RANZCR), DICOM, and New Zealand’s own medical auditor, IANZ.

At the forefront of this partnership is Nick Cook, a Medical Imaging Scientist for Waitaha Canterbury based at Christchurch Hospital, who manages medical image display quality for the region.

“I’ve been involved with quality assurance for radiology for many years,” says Nick. “When I first started in 2001, we had just two PACS monitors – large, bulky CRT models that cost $50,000 each. Over time, the demand for more affordable solutions grew, and for a while, we had to make do with manually calibrated, consumer models,” says Nick.

But when EIZO APAC arrived on the scene, the difference was profound. “Once we started using EIZO, the quality improved tremendously, and made life a lot easier for our radiologists,” says Nick. And it wasn’t just the radiologists who benefited from the change. “EIZO also made life significantly easier for me: thanks to RadiNET Pro, I could manage monitor QA remotely.”

Covering a large geographic region, Waitaha Canterbury operates a network of hospitals and clinics equipped with many EIZO monitors. Meeting RANZCR and DICOM standards across this network used to be a significant challenge for Nick and his team.

“You would have to visit each workstation every month or so to check if the monitors were calibrated correctly,” explains Nick. “When we used to buy monitors out of the box, it would come with a certain brightness, but after continuous usage it would tend to drift.”

Nick recalls the frustration of managing calibration issues across such a large network. “If something went wrong, I’d have to walk the corridors of Christchurch Hospital to track down the monitor and hunt for the records. It was painful, and that was just here.”

Thanks to EIZO’s RadiNET Pro, the QA process is centralised. Nick can manage calibration QA across the entire network from his base in Christchurch, including managing QA for Radiologists reporting from home and overseas.

“Everything is set up properly, linked to RadiNET Pro. This service logs all the QA procedures. Now we can monitor calibration remotely, and it makes things so much easier,” Nick notes.

The system is invaluable during audits by International Accreditation New Zealand (IANZ), ensuring compliance with international standards. “The quality of the QA information we have now is so much better,” says Nick.