Medical Imaging Blog

PACS

Winter = Time for a PACS

PACS, healthcare reform, supreme court Winter: the season of Christmas, snow-covered trees, sledding…and increased emergency room admissions due to slips and falls on ice and snow. Add to that car accidents and shoveling-related back injuries and the medical imaging professionals are going to have their hands full.

After one snowstorm in early 2011, for example, the University of Pennsylvania Health System’s radiology department performed 156 injury-related x-rays over two days, which was more than double their normal x-ray rate.

When temperatures fell into the 20’s after a few days of 35-degree highs, the resulting ice led to a swarm of accident victims flocking to Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton, Mass.

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Understanding the Supreme Court’s Healthcare Reform Case

PACS, healthcare reform, supreme court Just about everyone in the healthcare world knows that the Supreme Court will take up the controversial Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) sometime in March 2012, with a decision scheduled for June.

The issues at stake, however, are less well-known. Here is a very brief summary of the Supreme Court documents that show what the justices have to wrestle with (in no particular order):

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3D PACS Come to the Forefront

3D PACS, PACS, picture archiving and communication systemThe day of two-dimensional PACS isn’t quite over, but it soon will be. Three-dimensional PACS are rapidly becoming the norm in medical imaging centers throughout the country.

And for good reason.

Despite the exponential growth of processing and storage capability over the past decade, the PACS products available during that time generally did not keep pace with CT improvements that enabled radiologists to take images of ever-thinner sections of the body.

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Getting Lean in Medical Imaging

medical imaging, PACS, RIS, Many medical professionals have utilized lean manufacturing principles in their healthcare practices. Many more, in their desire to make their institutions more efficient, have unknowingly adopted the same principles.

According to an article in the Journal of American College of Radiology, it’s time for medical imaging professionals to think like lean manufacturers too.

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PACS Market Swings Toward Upgrades and Replacements

PACS , RIS, HISBack in May, we noted that the PACS market was growing steadily and that a significant portion would probably be in replacements and upgrades.

It turns out that we were right.

Here are the pertinent numbers from market research conducted by IMV’s Medical Information Division:

  • 87 percent. That’s the percentage of expenditures involving PACS that’s going toward upgrading existing PACS systems.
  • 85 percent. That’s the percentage of full-system PACS purchases that were replacement systems (meaning that just 15 percent were from first-time PACS buyers).
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CVIS and PACS Ending Information Systems Silos

CVIS and PACSA recent article from Diagnostic and Interventional Cardiology confirms what we at McKesson have known for a long time: that the goal of cardiovascular information systems (CVIS), also sometimes referred to as cardiology PACS, is to replace disparate software systems with a single solution, enabling medical imaging professionals to be much more efficient while improving care.

In the past, the cardiology department would have disparate systems for cath, echo, ECG management, etc. Cardiologists and other medical imaging professionals had to log into each system separately, and in many cases, information and images that were available in one location (like a hospital) were not available at another (like a clinic). To use technical language, the systems were “siloed.”

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Putting Medical Imaging and Healthcare Reform Together

Medical Imaging and health reformThe medical imaging profession “devotes an extraordinary amount of its energy to fighting off incursions into its turf by other disciplines and not enough energy to expanding imaging’s technical capacity and usefulness,” says Jeff Goldsmith in a recent article in HealthImaging.com.

Goldsmith, an Associate Professor of Public Health Sciences at the University of Virginia, thinks that radiologists and other medical imaging professionals need to think differently about their profession in order to effectively meet future demands. In particular, he thinks that micro-imaging (even at the molecular level) has yet to meet its full potential as a diagnostic tool and that typical diagnostic technologies should be seen as potentially therapeutic (such as high-intensity focused ultrasound). Such advances require medical imaging professionals to think outside the “radiology is only about imaging” box and the “radiologists don’t have anything to do with medicinal chemists” box.

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PACS in an Age of Change – Virtual Conference

PACS in the Age of Change - Virtual Conference

It’s free and it’s wherever you are. All you need is a good internet connection and questions about the rapidly changing PACS world.

This year’s PACS Spring Virtual Conference is designed especially for those who can’t attend the June conference of the Society of Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) in Washington, DC. It even includes a roundtable discussion co-sponsored by SIIM!

The details:

PACS in an Age of Change is on Tuesday May 17, 2011, starting at 10:00 am Eastern Time.

Presentations:

  • Meaningful Use and Radiology: What Next? Adeel Siddiqui, MBBS, Cooper University Hospital
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PACS Growth: Not “If,” but “How Much?”

Growth of PACS

 

McKesson and other manufacturers of picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) have a lot to look forward to. Consider the following:

 

  • According to a study by healthcare research firm Kalorama Information, the U.S. PACS market could hit $1.46 billion this year.
  • The same report forecasts double-digit growth for the PACS market through 2015, which means that in three years, hospitals and other healthcare institutions could be spending upward of $2 billion each year to add, replace, or upgrade a PACS.
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McKesson PACS Success in Nebraska

PACS

“We knew we needed a stable system out of the gate.” So says Chuck Lakso as he explains why his department chose McKesson PACS to replace its outdated image storage system.

Lakso is Radiology Director at the Nebraska Medical Center, the University of Nebraska’s medical hospital which performs more than 250,000 imaging procedures each year. Before implementing McKesson’s PACS solution, “The tools available to the radiologists weren’t adequate for everything we needed to accomplish,” says radiology chair Craig Walker. Images could not be downloaded or uploaded quickly, only certain computers could be used to view images, and paper orders were necessary to ensure that image interpretation wasn’t being duplicated.

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