Health Imaging & IT - January 2009 - (Page 26)

MANAGING TECHNOLOGY By Jonathan Batchelor RIS/PACS Migration & Integration owever, unlike large academic medical facilities, private practice diagnostic imaging centers face different challenges to extending a PACS throughout their enterprise—primarily extremely tight budgets and a limited pool of technical support employees. A pair of multi-site practices recently met these challenges and succeeded in extending the reach of their PACS, through a migration or integration. H offer Challenges for IMAGING CENTERS Deploying PACS capabilities beyond a single radiology facility provides the opportunity of extending the reach of diagnostic imaging to a greatly expanded customer base. The beneﬁts to imaging center practitioners are straightforward—increased market share and greater efﬁciencies from existing personnel. Easing the migration headaches At one point during his enrollment in business school, Randy Hicks, MD, MBA was assigned a paper detailing how he might go about reorganizing his Flint, Mich.-based radiology group to make it a more efficient, prosperous practice. Very quickly, Hicks concluded that Regional Medical Imaging (RMI) needed to embrace a distributed model for reading so that the practice could provide subspecialty interpretation to multiple clients without having radiologists present at every RMI site. Having to perform this academic exercise inspired Hicks to explore the possibility of acquiring such technology for RMI. Unfortunately, at the time (about 10 years ago), PACS was not a particularly practical investment at the practice level. These were systems intended for large hospital applications, judging by the price point of the systems at the time. However, he accomplished what he could with the deployment by of a collection of mini-PACS in the practice. This solution, while acceptable at first, did not meet the needs of RMI as the practice grew to five imaging centers with 110 employees. About three years ago, Hicks made the decision to migrate RMI from its mini-PACS installations to a complete, enterprise-level PACS from Amicas. “Amicas PACS gives me the ability to read all of my exams from one workstation,” says Hicks. “It has developed a single workstation that has all the mammography workflow, 3D tools and patient information that I need, which reduces the number of places I have to go to read a case to one.” Once a system was selected, Hicks began preparing the practice for migration. His HealthImaging.com [ Regional Medical Imaging in Flint, Mich., migrated from mini-PACS to Amicas PACS three years ago. The PACS provides the new Patient Record and the new Halo Viewer, both of which complement the RealTime Worklist. ] 26 Health Imaging & IT | January 2009 http://www.HealthImaging.com

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Health Imaging & IT - January 2009 Contents The Enterprise News Update DR Breathes New Life into Radiography Radiology in the Spotlight Educational Sessions Keynote Addresses Tech Trends on the Exhibit Floor Imaging Tools Managing Technology People & Technology Reader's Resource

Health Imaging & IT - January 2009

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