Jun 10
30
Good advice for PACS administrators
Via AuntMinnie.
Some HighLights:
Kennedy recommended that institutions consider a business continuity system as an alternate mechanism to maintaining essential functions during downtime. This can be as simple as deploying a small public domain miniPACS, or as sophisticated as using a fully redundant primary PACS network, according to Kennedy.
DCM4CHEE is good for lots of things – including just that!
As a result, multiple methods of communication should be utilized, including phone calls and even posters. “You cannot overcommunicate,” he said. Also, anticipate misinformation and manage around it, he added.
I.e. chinese whispers (at best).
“One of the CT applications people I worked with many years ago gave me a wonderful piece of advice, and that’s to always carry a stopwatch,” Kennedy said. “I do that still, because sometimes it’s very hard to convince [a person who thinks it takes 35 seconds to load a CT scan]. But the stopwatch says five [seconds], and people will believe stopwatches.”
I’ve never resorted to carrying a stopwatch but the principle works for lots of user reports – “the system is down!” or “the system can’t do …..” as examples. Never assume end users have the same ability to distinguish between two elements that you do. Always be prepared to move around to the users perspective and translate.
There are things that cost a million dollars not that many years ago that now can be done for 1/100th or 1/1000th of that price. Many of our PACS vendors haven’t really leveraged that, …
Jeez I’ve been saying that for years. For additional archive storage to be costing the same as 5 years ago is criminal. Folk still pay, though. Like voting, people get the government they deserve.
When it’s time for a new PACS, even more issues come up, including PACS-to-PACS migration issues and the debate of whether to consider a PACS with a vendor-neutral archive.
There’s no such thing as vendor-neutral archive – only vendor-different (except, of course for fully Open Source solutions). Lets take the Carestream product as an example. If Carestream goes belly-up or decides to drop the product – would you get support and further development elsewhere? No. I thought not.
Update: If relying on user reports to determine performance problems isn’t always a good idea, basing a study on them mightn’t be either. I dare say it may well have the right conclusion but I’d worry about the quality of the raw data.