Most of the radiology facilities need some workflows/functionalities those help providing better patient service, evaluate/enhance reporting quality or enhance learning process.
These workflows/functionalities include:
- Teaching Files
- MDT Meetings
- Peer Review
- Critical Results Management
- Patient Engagement
- Imaging Mobility
The question is whether to have these workflows/functionalities either:
– Built-in PACS/RIS solutions,
OR
– Have them as independent (vendor natural) solutions (not part of the PACS/RIS solutions, yet seamlessly integrated to them)?
Having them as PACS native built-in functions may guarantee the integration within the PACS workflow. However, there are FIVE reasons why having these workflows/functionalities independent from the PACS would be much more useful:
1. Customization
The level of customization would be higher and the features set would be larger resulting in fulfilling larger base of end-users.
2. Data migration
Migrating data related to these workflows/functionalities as modules built in the PACS to another PACS system would be very difficult or even impossible. So having them as independent solutions would be much more useful and efficient as it would be only a matter of integrating these solutions to the new PACS system to continue using them while maintaining the whole history, old data and users’ familiarity with these solutions.
3. Adding new features
Adding new features or response to change requests would be much faster and more flexible as this would be having a new release from that independent solution only. This is not the case when adding a feature (for example in MDT workflow) included in the PACS system, which requires having a whole new release from the PACS system (much harder and longer process).
4. Integration to multiple PACS systems
It is very difficult to integrate the teaching files, MDT or peer review included in the PACS/RIS to another PACS/RIS system (either in the same hospital or in another hospital) while this is very easy to do if any of these functionalities is an independent solution.
5. Regional solutions
As the need to have regional MDT or teaching files solutions is increasing to overcome the shortage of resources or sharing knowledge & expertise, the need to have these workflows/functionalities in a regional level is increasing, as this would be very hard to be done with these functionalities built-in the PACS/RIS with the need to add more features and manage both local/regional activities and integration to multiple PACS/RIS/EMR in different hospitals within that region.
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