by
Barbara Kram, Editor | April 13, 2009
This report originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of DOTmed Business News
Like any modern enterprise, a hospital must focus not just on its core services, but on the information systems that support them. These systems include all the administrative and clinical data that are a part of the hospital information system (HIS), such as the radiology information system (RIS) and its integration with medical imaging (PACS).
As computers advance rapidly in their capabilities to store and process information, the definition of PACS is changing with increased expectations on how well medical images are captured, viewed and shared. As a result, today's picture archiving and communication systems do much more than the abbreviation "PACS" suggests.
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"The definition of PACS keeps evolving," said consultant Gary Reed, Principal, Integration Resources, Asbury, N.J. "In the late 1980s, if you could get an image off a scanner and display it digitally they called it a PACS. In the early 1990s, if you could do that in two modalities and have an archive, they would call that a PACS. Soon integration to the radiology information system was needed."
Today, major hospitals think of PACS as a fully integrated, real time radiology service with all modalities, RIS integration, document scanning, voice dictation, enterprise-wide distribution capabilities, and wide-area access outside the hospital via the Internet. Reed also noted that integration with other electronic medical records (see related story) and advanced visualization software are becoming more widely adopted. While that is the vision, full-function PACS is not yet a reality at many institutions.
Nearly every university and large hospital has adopted PACS components and about 80% of smaller hospitals and diagnostic imaging centers now have some form of PACS, although the term may be used more loosely by smaller institutions and providers.
"If we define PACS as a system for reading images in a filmless way in a radiology department, then most hospitals have some provisions to do that," said Henri "Rik" Primo, Strategic Relations Manager, Image and Knowledge Management, Siemens Medical Solutions. "When we talk about distribution of the PACS images and RIS reports electronically across the enterprise and even outside of the enterprise to third-party referring physicians, there is still some market out there."
