Dear AuntMinnie Member,
Having your PACS network go down is never a fun experience. But with a little advance planning you can make PACS downtime somewhat less disruptive.
That's according to imaging informatics expert Dr. Steven Horii, who spoke on the topic of PACS downtime at the PACS 2007 conference in San Antonio this week. Staff writer Erik L. Ridley was on hand to report on the presentation for our PACS Digital Community.
Dr. Horii offers a number of suggestions for ameliorating PACS outages, both scheduled and unscheduled. It starts with design of the PACS network -- building in fault tolerance and avoiding single points of failure will offer benefits down the road.
Once the system is up and running, it's crucial to set up a backup PACS to take the place of the main PACS in the event of downtime. The backup system could be a thin-client Web-based system, or could be based on an add-on image processing system such as 3D workstations that can be repurposed for primary review on an emergency basis.
Dr. Horii has found that having a plan B in place can reduce the impact of PACS outages, both planned and unplanned, and can enable an imaging facility to continue providing services to referring physicians even under less than optimal conditions.
Get the rest of the story by clicking here, or visit our PACS Digital Community at pacs.auntminnie.com for this story and more coverage from the PACS 2007 meeting.
