Imaging Technology News 9/08

Focal Point PARCA Have You Hit The Glass Ceiling? SAs find opportunities in cardiology, endoscopy, surgery, pathology and vendors’ PACS. By Herman Oosterwijk A recent poll, held during a PARCA Web cast on careers for PACS healthcare professionals, revealed that 57 percent of PACS administrators felt they reached their ceiling with regard to career opportunities. In other words, they did not feel that there were any growth opportunities for them at their current institution. This is somewhat shocking, and I believe this perspective is a due to the fact that most professionals are unaware of the opportunities that surround them. What are some of those career opportunities? First of all, there is an opportunity for lateral growth in an institution to support and manage other imaging specialties. For example, cardiology is increasingly being digitized, and with the experience under the belt of implementing a PACS in radiology, the system administrator (SA) would be the ideal candidate to take this under his or her wing as well. In addition, other applications such as surgery and endoscopy are looking to get rid of their video cassettes and/or DVDs or maybe even paper prints and want to store their digital images. They need someone with an imaging support background to make this transition. Another logical growth path would be to also support lab and pathology. Although pathology is not quite ready to go digital yet, hampered by the fact that these images are really large, the workflow is somewhat similar: They have requests for procedures similar to radiology requests and they were among the first users of speech recognition for reports. In addition, they are highly computerized. As mentioned, the challenge with this modality is the large image size, digitizing a specimen could result in 50 GB or more per image. That means that storage space is going to measured in pentabytes instead of terabytes. This will provide major infrastructure challenges, and require novel mechanisms to store and access the images. There are other career opportunities, especially with vendors. There is a need for system administrators to manage a vendor’s PACS, especially during the start-up phase. When dealing with rather sophisticated applications such as 3D visualization, vendors typically hire experienced people with a clinical background to train their customer base. This seems to be a very popular choice, given the fact that 93 percent of PACS SAs indicated that they would consider a career at a vendor. This is rather remarkable, knowing that most of these positions require extensive travel, probably most applicable for anyone moving into a career in sales or marketing, less for a professional who ends up supporting a single site. It would actually be very useful to have more professionals with actual field experience in vendor organizations, if only to be a customer advocate. Having worked at vendors for many years myself, I found that they are often removed from reality and that there is an urgent need to have better eyes and ears to make sure products are meeting customer requirements. One cannot blame the engineers who develop medical imaging products: They don’t know any better, especially if they don’t get the opportunity to verify with the actual users that their products that their designs, user interfaces and approaches make sense. There are other career opportunities, especially with vendors. — Herman Oosterwijk, PARCA advisory board member By taking on more responsibilities for other specialties and departments, there are more opportunities for imaging and informatics professionals (IIPs) than people realize, especially in institutions. New imaging applications are increasingly being digitized, with pathology being especially promising, and at the same time, challenging in the future. There also seems to be a large pool of IIPs willing to make the jump to the industry, which will only help vendors to develop and deliver better quality products. ITN Herman Oosterwijk is part of the PARCA advisory board (www.pacsadmin.org) as well as the Educational Advisory Network of SIIM. advertiser index • advertiser index • advertiser index COMPANY Carestream Health Inc. Civco Medical Solutions CMS, an Elekta Co. ECRI Institute IMPAC an Elekta Co. Frost & Sullivan WEB ADDRESS www.carestreamhealth.com/drx1 www.civco.com www.cmsrtp.com www.ecri.org www.impac.com/mo www.frost.com PAGE 2 26 40 37 20-21, 24 36 COMPANY Gammex Philips Healthcare ROS Inc. SenoRx TomoTherapy Inc. Varian Medical Systems WEB ADDRESS www.gammex.com www.philips.com/healthcare www.theraviewusa.com www.senorx.com www.TomoTherapy.com www.varian.com/rapidarc ITNonline.net | September 2008 ITN PAGE 14 35 16 25 15 8-9, 12 | ITN | 39 http://www.pacsadmin.org http://www.carestreamhealth.com/drx1 http://www.gammex.com http://www.civco.com http://www.philips.com/healthcare http://www.cmsrtp.com http://www.theraviewusa.com http://www.ecri.org http://www.senorx.com http://www.impac.com/mo http://www.TomoTherapy.com http://www.frost.com http://www.varian.com/rapidarc http://www.ITNonline.net

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Imaging Technology News 9/08

Imaging Technology News 9/08 Contents IGRT How IGRT Targets the Prostate ASTRO Oncology Information Management Systems (OIMS) Imaging Leading the Intense Race Against Cancer SBRT - The New Treatment of Choice Top IMRT/IGRT Centers to Watch Molecular Imaging: Ready for the Limelight CR or DR in the ER? Have You Hit the Glass Ceiling?

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