Building a future-ready radiology department at Immanuel Klinik Rüdersdorf

As part of the Immanuel Albertinen network and a university hospital of the Brandenburg Medical School, Immanuel Klinik Rüdersdorf has a dual mission: delivering high-quality regional care while fulfilling academic and teaching responsibilities. The hospital is part of the Immanuel Albertinen Diakonie and an academic teaching and research hospital of the Brandenburg Medical School Theodor Fontane, delivering comprehensive clinical services across multiple specialties. With approximately 450 beds and clinical strengths in neurology, orthopedics, and trauma surgery, diagnostic imaging is central to patient outcomes.

For many years, radiology services were delivered through an external cooperation. While functional, this setup increasingly limited flexibility and turnaround times. With growing clinical demands in neurology, orthopedics, and trauma care, the hospital faced a critical question: could its existing setup truly support university-level medicine? The answer was clear: radiology department needed to become an integrated in-house service.

To meet its quality ambitions and strengthen patient care, the hospital made a strategic decision to establish its own radiology department from the ground up.

Building a new radiology department requires more than acquiring imaging equipment. The institution needed a partner capable of supporting planning, integration, and long-term operations across the entire radiology workflow. Partnering with Philips, the hospital implemented a 360°-project that included the complete equipping of the new radiology department. From room planning, through providing diagnostic devices, system design to integration and go-live, Philips supported throughout the entire process of creating a modern complete digital diagnostic workflow, enabling also tele-radiology and boosting smooth cross-site collaboration, ensuring that hardware, software, and services worked seamlessly together.

Today, radiology at Immanuel Klinik Rüdersdorf operates as an integrated, digital workflow: from patient registration to image acquisition, reporting, and clinical consultation. Radiologists work primarily within PACS, supported by dynamic worklist prioritization looking at providing the best quality, structured reporting, advanced visualization powered by AI, and fast access to prior studies. Crucially, the solution enables cross-site collaboration within the radiology network. Radiologists can read studies from different locations as if they were sitting side by side supporting night and weekend coverage, as well as high-quality subspecialty consultation. “For the radiologist, it makes no difference whether a study comes from Rüdersdorf or Hamburg. The experience is seamless” as states by Dr. Med. Torsten Diekhoff, Chief Physician and Director of Radiology.

The integrated environment simplifies daily work. Consistent workflows across modalities reduce manual steps, minimize errors, and accelerate examinations directly benefiting both staff and patients. “Everything we need for reporting is available in one system. That saves time and allows us to concentrate fully on the diagnosis.” concludes Dr. Med. Torsten Diekhoff, echoed by Monika Littlewood, Lead Radiology Technologist “when we open the order in the radiology information system, WIM (Workflow Information Management), we have everything at a glance. We have the laboratory data, patient data, diagnoses, and questions all in one view.”

Although Immanuel Klinik Rüdersdorf is a comparatively small hospital performing around 25,000 radiology studies per year it holds a unique strategic position. As part of a regional hospital network and a university system, the clinic combines patient care, education, and innovation. The new radiology department provides the technological and organizational foundation to leverage this positioning: supporting cross-site reading, academic collaboration, and training of future radiologists. At the same time, it creates a scalable model for efficient radiology operations in mid-sized hospitals.

For hospital leadership and IT teams alike, reliability in daily operations is critical. From an IT perspective, the move to a single-vendor radiology environment significantly reduced complexity by minimizing interfaces and simplifying support. Centralized management also supports cybersecurity, system updates, and future scalability.

With its end-to-end radiology setup now fully operational, Immanuel Klinik Rüdersdorf is on track to become a reference site demonstrating how integrated imaging, clinical workflows, and partnership can elevate radiology performance across the entire care continuum. “With the new radiology, we can deliver fast, high-quality diagnostics while remaining flexible and future oriented.” concludes Dr. Med. Torsten Diekhoff, Chief Physician and Director of Radiology, Immanuel Klinik Rüdersdorf.