Patent ID: 7630371

Claim:
A method for automatic routing of messages encountered in a healthcare communication network, comprising: receiving, by a computer processing system for processing messages within a healthcare communication network, a message in a Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) format; parsing the received message to determine values for a set of message fields comprising system and message parameters that characterize the received message, wherein the system parameters comprise one or more of available healthcare communication network bandwidth, current message queue size, quality of service, and network resource availability, and the message parameters comprise one or more of message format, message length, urgency indicator, message source, and identified recipient; determining whether the received message is missing any message field values required for proper application of a set of conditional rules; adding default field values for any missing message field value to allow proper application of the set of conditional rules; determining content payload of the received message, wherein the content payload comprises image data; performing image analysis on the image data to determine values to which the set of conditional rules can be applied to determine the healthcare communication network destination for the received message; applying the set of conditional rules to message field values and determined content payload of the received message; and directing the received message to the determined healthcare communication network destination.