From the April 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Stoval says that although challenges stand between hospitals and a singular unified imaging system, it can be done. “We can take people to a full enterprise imaging reality today, but implementing it will be a multi-phase process,” he says. With all the financial prioritizing a hospital has to do, Stoval says completely integrated imaging is often a big-picture goal that necessarily gets pushed aside at times in order to meet more immediate needs and changes in regulations.

One hurdle to managing all the images produced in a hospital on a single PACS, according to Primo, is that many departments in the hospital do not save their images in the DICOM 3.0 format. Without that data interlinked to the images, it’s unclear how images would be meaningfully interpreted on a viewing workstation.


Viewers, VNAs, and EHRs
Today, the results of one imaging study can inform another. Finding ways to automate and simplify the relationships between those images saves valuable time in getting an accurate diagnosis, and is as much a part of the PACS conversation as anything else.

Sectra’s Collins says one of their upcoming releases will feature a tool allowing radiologists to simultaneously examine a just taken CT against another image, such as an MR or a PET study from a year ago. “There are others who will do a level of synchronized scrolling between modalities of the same type and within a similar time period, but I think we are pretty far out in the front in terms of the level to which we can do that,” says Collins.

Design prerogatives are changing too. “It went from ‘can I display an image; can I page it forward and back, can I window level it?’ To today, where you’re looking to improve productivity by automating and organizing the delivery of informatics,” says Craske. “The sophistication shows.”

For Stoval, these new levels of functionality illustrate how completely the systems are being reimagined, “Communication is happening in PACS, but it’s much bigger than that and the theory of archiving has broadened.” CT exams are increasingly comprehensive, tomosynthesis is taking off, and more images than ever are being generated. Fortunately, VNAs have emerged as flexible repositories to meet the demands of storing all that data while also making it possible for images to be shared across institutions that do not have the same PACS provider.
With many PACS vendors, purchasing a VNA from a separate provider ensures you won’t be contractually obligated to stay with your PACS vendor indefinitely. Steve Deaton, vice president of sales at Viztek, says historically PACS had to be proprietary, but “you don’t necessarily have to store your images in the proprietary format anymore.”

April 2015 Magazine

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