Dear PACS Insider,
PACS downtime is the bane of any institution. However, with the right mix of technology and communication, the hassles of an unavailable PACS can be significantly ameliorated, according to the experience of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.
In a talk at the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) annual meeting earlier this month in Grapevine, TX, Cincinnati Children's Jay Moskovitz shared how the institution's new business continuity plan yielded improved communication, functionality, and patient care.
How did they do it? Learn more in this edition's Insider Exclusive, which you can access before our regular AuntMinnie.com members.
In other coverage from SIIM 2013, find out how radiologists can utilize computerized physician order-entry technology to efficiently order scanner protocols for imaging studies. In the Sam Dwyer Lecture at the meeting's opening session, Dr. Bradley Erickson, PhD, emphasized the need for the imaging informatics community to work together to innovate and then translate IT imaging advances into practice.
Also, an image sharing system has yielded critical improvements for managing studies of transfer trauma patients arriving at the University of Maryland's R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. Get the details here.
The need for image sharing is also the subject of a new column from Dr. Sam Friedman, aka the Dalai Lama of PACS. In his latest contribution, the Dalai Lama makes a strong case that the time has come to fix the image sharing problem.
Also, a paging system for referring physicians was found to dramatically decrease the gap in time between when an imaging study was read and reported by a radiologist and when it was available for viewing by the clinician. For that article, click here.
Meanwhile, Jef Williams of Ascendian Healthcare Consulting shares his thoughts on universal viewers and vendor-neutral archives, while medical informatics expert David Clunie provides a wrapup of the Summit on Color in Medical Imaging.
In other contributions, consultant Herman Oosterwijk of OTech describes how Saudi Arabia is making great strides in healthcare IT.
Do you have an idea for a topic you'd like to see covered in your PACS Digital Community? As always, please feel free to drop me a line.
