Whitney Palmer

Splitting With Your PACS Vendor

Published on the Nov. 28, 2012, DiagnosticImaging.com website

By Whitney L.J. Howell

CHICAGO — In many ways, your relationship with your PACS vendor is like a marriage: good times when the system works well, bad times when it needs maintenance. There’s no doubt, though, that you’re relatively stuck together, and splitting is both painful and hard.

Changing your PACS vendor isn’t a decision to make lightly. You’ll face significant challenges to making the switch, but it can be done, Steven Horii, MD, the director of medical informatics in the University of Pennsylvania radiology department, told a group at this year’s RSNA annual meeting.

Your biggest problem, he said, is the several terabytes of data currently sitting in your existing PACS. All that information must be migrated over to your new system.

“Look at what it will take to transfer your data as far in advance as possible,” he said. “We put DICOM images in there, but the problem is that vendors don’t store our data that way. They use proprietary database tables and reassemble an image into DICOM format when you ask for it. It’s not as simple as going to the archive, putting in a flash drive, and pulling out your data.”

To get the best result, you should begin the migration with at least the past one to two years. That should cover roughly 80 percent to 90 percent of your studies, he said.

With that much stored information, though, there will be mistakes. Patients could have multiple record entries under slightly different names, studies could have been entered with incorrect request numbers, or you could have records for dead-end or orphan studies. It will take time to fix these errors, Horii said, and you will either need to do them manually or with additional software.

The time it takes to migrate your data can also present difficulties. Horii recommended you have a frank conversation with your new vendor about a realistic time frame for how long it will take to make the switch. Many times, new vendors provide time estimates based on having 100 percent to your PACS system. Unless you intend to shut down your practice until your new system is functional, that’s not a feasible option. Determine how much access you can give them each day to accurately pinpoint when your new PACS will be ready to work.

If your new vendor misses that migration deadline, you can encounter problems, especially if your old PACS is running low on storage space. In these cases, Horii said, negotiate a reduction in the migration fee so you are compensated for the added stress and delay.

To read the remainder of the story at its original location: http://www.diagnosticimaging.com/conference-reports/rsna2012/content/article/113619/2116754

December 5, 2012 - Posted by wjpalmer | Healthcare | challenges of switching PACS vendors, discussing maintenance of old PACS, discussing migration time with new PACS vendor, divorcing PACS vendor, fixing errors in PACS, migrating data to new PACS, PACS and DICOM format, RSNA Annual Meeting 2012, Steven Horii MD, switching PACS vendor