by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | February 11, 2019
From the January/February 2019 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
However, when implementing an enterprise system, the special considerations don’t only extend to radiology.
“Radiology people don’t have a full perspective of the imaging needs of non-radiologists,” Gray said. “IT needs to think, ‘how are the new generation of EHR users going to visualize images?’”
Healthcare organizations also need to think about what kind of images may need to be securely viewed and archived, such as iPhone photos from dermatology or a burn unit, Gray said. They also need to think about their budget now and what they might lose by waiting to move to an enterprise system.
“Ask all the questions,” Gray said. “What do we want to put in this, aside from radiology pictures? … You need to understand the big picture and understand the timetable to achieving it,” Gray said. “Once you have decided that you understand that, then how long are you going to give yourself to get there?”
It’s also important for many other non-clinical teams to now be involved in a PACS purchase.
“There should be input from risk management, teams that look at communications, infrastructure,” Siegel said.
Facilities also need to consider future imaging needs when planning a PACS and VNA switch.
“If you have a 16-slice CT scanner and you know you’re going to 128, that means thousands of images,” said Cris Bennett, a PACS specialist with MD Buyline. “You really have to look ahead, budget wise.”
Planning the transition
With so many stakeholders involved, it is important to plan for a transition to a tightly integrated and/or single new system, which is likely to be more complicated than one hospital switching to a new PACS vendor.
After the merger four years ago and switch to the new PACS, the two New York City health systems are “still migrating the data,” said Mendelson of Mount Sinai.
Large health systems converting to a new PACS and VNA need to look at the “quality and consistency” of the data they’re migrating, Dennison said. Procedure descriptions can differ from hospital to hospital.
“Everyone’s calling the same exam by a different name,” Dennison said. “You have to convert all of the historical values, and you can have thousands of unique descriptions per site. Or you create a mapping, which is more complex. It has a big impact on productivity. A lot of organizations, in the rush to convert, have to spend a lot of time cleaning up after the migration to get their software features to work as they want them to.”
Dennison said there are a number of data migration service providers who can help with the data conversions.
