From the January/February 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

When one looks at the buzz words in the market in the past few years and the underlying trends, the impression is that we are shifting from a deconstructed to constructed PACS/best of suite approach. Customers want clinical benefits and one point of contact. That is not saying they go with a monolithic IT approach, but instead will require open application program interfaces (APIs) and standards compliance to achieve their end goals. I don’t see us going back to traditional PACS. ”

Lenny Reznik, vice president of marketing at Agfa HealthCare, believes in using what you have to get where you are going. “PACS, as traditionally defined, is a siloed information system for radiology and cardiology, where enterprise imaging (EI) is the ‘new’ PACS. We consider enterprise imaging to be a single comprehensive patient imaging record that enables multi-specialty collaboration and have adopted a platform strategy to deliver this. We can integrate whatever the customer is looking for using a single modular platform as they move forward. We’re not telling the customer to throw anything away but rather to pull all the parts together using interoperability standards.”


Tomer Levy, general manager of workflow and infrastructure at McKesson, says his company takes the same basic approach and elaborates further. “Electronic imaging isn’t about replacing PACS per se, but rather getting more from your PACS and connecting different PACS together. This becomes relevant as more organizations deal with mergers and acquisitions and need to be able to implement the enterprise imaging strategies that span across the enterprise. What everyone’s imaging is about is implementing imaging across the enterprise — making more of your PACS, if you will — and creating an interoperable workflow across the entire enterprise. “

Interoperability was without a doubt the leading area of interest at RSNA 2015. There has been a lot of discussion around both DICOM and IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Environment) standards and how vendors have adhered to them. As Levy of McKesson indicated, integrating disparate clinical systems is key, given the marketplace consolidation. It is also important in implementing new technologies like breast tomosynthesis and other applications. Typically there is a two- to five-year delay from the time a standard is formally adopted by the various DICOM and IHE committees until it is implemented by the vendors. This causes a bit of confusion with end users who hear about a new standard and expect its adoption by the vendors to be nearly instantaneous.

January/February 2016 Magazine

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