From the April 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

Unfortunately, based on any of these perspectives, next-gen PACS hasn’t arrived.

Too expensive
No organization is more keen on finding the “next generation” PACS than one that has deployed a VNA. One of the more important assumptions associated with the VNA is that when the time comes to replace the incumbent PACS, a next-generation PACS will be available — one designed to fully interoperate with the VNA. Since many of these organizations have also chosen to image-enable their EMRs with a single universal viewing application, these organizations are looking for that next-generation PACS that is solely focused on the functions associated with acquiring images, performing QC, accumulating all related clinical information required to support the diagnosis, and making all of this, plus the image data, available via the diagnostic viewing application. Once the report has been finalized, the complete data package is handed off to the VNA. A next-gen PACS that will be paired with a VNA is not responsible for long-term data management. Assuming the existence of the separate universal viewer, it is not responsible for supporting image access and display for the physicians using the EMR.
While no one expects that the combined cost of the VNA, universal viewer and next-gen PACS should equal the cost of a standalone current generation PACS, it is widely believed that removing the archiving and clinical viewing application should represent a significant savings. Whether the cost reduction should be 15 percent, 25 percent, or more is open to debate. If one were to request a line item quote for a replacement radiology PACS, what percentage of the total cost would be represented by the line items associated with the archive functionality, the associated storage infrastructure and the clinical viewing license? Those line item costs appear to be significant when they are added into the quote, but not so significant when they are removed.

What’s up with PACS pricing?
To understand why PACS are priced like this, a little history is in order. Back in the era of film-based image management systems, the older multi-format camera gave way to the laser imager, which listed for an average of $97,000. The previous one-to-one relationship of imaging device to format camera would have been pretty expensive if applied to the laser imager, so a multi-port frontend was developed for the laser imager. This multi-modality interface (MMI) device could enable the sharing of one laser imager among three to six individual modalities. The average list price for a three-input MMI was $50,000.

April 2013 Magazine

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