Within the Open Three Consortium (O3) an open source Image-Data Manager/Archiver, called O3- DPACS, has been studied, developed
and experimented in the routine of European and US hospitals. The O3 Consortium is an international open-source project constituted
in 2005 by Higher Education in Clinical Engineering (HECE) of the University of Trieste; it deals with the multi-centric integration
of hospitals, RHIOs and citizen (care at home and on the move, and ambient assisted living). O3-DPACS is the evolution of
the DPACS (Data & Picture Archiving and Communication System) project, started in 1995 at the University of Trieste, with
the goal to develop an open, scalable, cheap and universal system with accompanying tools, to store, exchange and retrieve
all health information of each citizen at hospital, metropolitan, regional, national and European levels, thus offering an
integrated virtual health card of the European Citizens, in a citizen-centric vision.
