EBME Forums Forums Maintenance Technical Assistance Philips Intellivue XDS

Hi Geoff. I guess it came out a bit weird, and I am sure Mr Runesmith has the best interests of his institution and the members of this forum at heart.

What I wanted was for Mr Runesmith would provide some details to establish his credentials. That way, the next time we need to do a bit of head-hunting, we would know where to look . If I offended anyone, I apologize.

No need to apologise (well, certainly not to me, at least). In fact I agree with you. I believe that we should know who every one is on the forum, and especially those who come on here asking for this, that and the other.

How many times have helping hands been extended, only for us to learn later that some guy or other has used the information to make a fast buck? Answer:- a few times (to my certain knowledge).

Why can't everyone be upfront about who they are, who they represent, and what it is they are trying to do?

PS: I appreciate your neat bit of back-tracking, there, by the way. Head-hunting. Yeah, right.

Hi Chandana, Geoff. Sorry for my late reply. I fully agree with your concerns and the points from Chandana's PM. So let me give some information about myself.

I work for a biomed service provider that has contracts with hospitals, as well as with some vendors (incl Philips) for bench repairs. I am originally from Manchester, and have worked in Canada before, and now based in europe (but not in UK). I am attached to a hospital where I take care of the (mostly philips) patient monitors and (mostly draeger) vents. I had many trainings from philips, but I was never a Philips employee, and never part of bench repairs, so no conflict of interest there.

I work in a large privately owned hospital. Most of the ICUs have new philips monitors, except one where the old HP merlins are waiting for replacement, and a bunch of datex AS3's in OR (yes, I repair them too). Some of the datex is up for replacement as well (thank God).

Even though this place has no biomed dept of its own, they have a huge IT department. Sometimes it is quite a challenge to make them realize that medical PCs should be treated as such (esp the centrals). That is the reason why I was impressed with XDS, because unlike the central, it can run on a IT maintained PC (makes it easier for those simple folk to understand). The other thing that impressed me is the electronic printing to PDF, since we have a home-grown EMR that IT is so proud of, and they currently scan printed reports to go in to the EMR. Your PDF printing could take care of that easily. Like Geoff said, credit where credit is due.

If we get Philips monitors to replace the SICU and OR, I'll get a chance to play with the full XDS system. As I understand, I need to have a monitor with G software and xds options to do that, but all our current monitors are F and below. As biomed is not part of the hospital, we are never asked for our opinion in choosing equipment, so I have absolutely no influence on that, unfortunately. But IT does, and I think your xds did make an impression on them. They were not aware of printing until I showed them. My vested interest here is to influence them to buy philips so that I don't have to keep on servicing those AS3s

Thanks for all the detailed guides. They were very helpful, and easier to follow than your xds user manual. XDS was not covered in any of my trainings, and the manual was a bit tough to understand. I appreciate the effort you made, especially since you are probably not a techie (if those MD after your name stand for what I think they mean). It is great to have direct support from vendors in a forum like this, and I hope it will continue.

I apologize if I created any confusion in my earlier posts, that may have lead people to believe I am not who I appear to be. Chandaana, I fully understand the reasons behind your comments and PM, and no offense taken.

PS. ofcourse my real name is not runesmith. Those who play a certain famous MMORPG will know that Runesmith is a character class that can create magic through mechanical means (just like us biomeds).

Well, that was a very comprehensive "introduction", I must say.

A "large privately owned hospital" heavily into IT ... and yet no in-house biomed department? What sort of set up is that? Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. Perhaps they need some, shall we say, "advice"! Let's hope they've managed to employ a few nurses!

But meanwhile, I always thought that Loc: UK was meant to indicate that someone was located in the United Kingdom! Not that it matters to me, of course.

Quite normal in the private hospital environment, Geoff. That is where independant EBME companies come in. We provide a "third party service" under contract.

Yes, Mate. I'm well aware of all that. But thanks for pointing it out ... for the benefits of others, presumably.

Thanks Runesmith. I have forwarded your comments about the user manual to the relevant people.

Since you were talking about the OR, there are applications for the printing solution there as well. If your OR does not have an anesthesia charting system, the anesthetists would either transcribe the data in to a paper record, or would print the vital signs database at the end of the case and attach it to the record. There are often situations where the someone discharges the patient from the monitor before the anethetist had a chance to transcribe some of the data or print the record. If you connect all the OR monitors to a single PC running the XDS infrastructure services with PDF printing enabled, you can set the monitor to auto-print PDF reports at regular intervals and at discharge (End Case) to this PC. If the anesthetist wants to refer back to the reports, they are easy to find: the reports will be automatically sorted according to the hierarchy you selected via the printing scripts (eg. Folder for each OR, and a sub-folder underneath for each medical record number, with the reports named with the patient name, medical record number, date and time). The reports can be auto-deleted by enabling the clean-up scripts, so that a clean up will take place if the hard disk gets full or if a report is too old. With the terabyte sized hard disks available today, you can go for a very long time without the need for a clean up (a PDF report is about 250KB in size, which means you can store around 3 million reports in a 1TB hard disk - while still giving the OS and other apps a generous 250 GB space). This could also give your IT a head start if they are planning on building their own anesthesia record system.

@chandana: I got together with one of the guys from IT and we tried out the printing. Everything works great when we print to the hard disk of the PC itself, but it doesn't seem to work with a network share. The person logged in to the PC has full access to the network share, and can open the folder, can add or delete files and so on. However the application doesn't seem to "see" the network share. We can set it up in the printing configuration as the destination, but the files just don't make it to the share.

Are we doing this wrong? Is this a firewall issue? Or is there a bug in the application?

Sorry, please ignore the previous post. We managed to get it working. It was apparently an access rights issue.

Hello Runesmith,

Sorry for the delay in replying. I am glad you have managed to get the settings correct.

As you noted, this is indeed an access rights issue. The printing infrastructure uses by default the local system account. Usually a local system account has validity only on the PC where it resides. To all other PCs on the network, that is a nobody. So when it tries to put a file on a network share, it fails, even though the current user logged in to the PC has access rights to the share, since the printing service does not impersonate the currently logged-in user.

The reason why the service does not impersonate the currently logged-in user, is because the printing service needs to run in the background even if there is no user logged on to the machine.

One way of resolving this is to grant the local system account access rights to the share. If you do this, you should implement anti-virus protection on both the printing PC and the host of the share. Many viruses use local system account to copy themselves to such "open" shares.

The other, more secure way would be to print to a local folder, share that folder, and give access rights to that folder for a "collector service" running on your server. The collector should monitor the shared folder(s) assigned to it, pick up new files and copy them over. This is the kind of simple network service that IT guys can code with their eyes closed. If you require assistance with that, I can provide code snippets you can use (Note: any additional code snippets / applications I may provide as assistance on this forum are for "as is" use with no legal responsibility offered or implied. Such applications or code snippets are not Philips developed software, but rather software developed personally for non-commercial use).

Please let me know if I can be of further help.