And the Number One… Top of the Top 10 Lists - SIIM News Summer 2008

The following are the number one answers from recent Top 10 lists in SIIM News; view all of the Top 10 lists online.

Top Feature Clinicians Require in an Image Viewer: Ease of Use. Many commercially available clinician workstations are re-packaged radiologist workstations. For clinicians, this software is often too complex to be user-friendly (e.g. most clinicians don’t know what W/L means, nor why the ‘bone’ setting is available for CT, but not other images). Few commercially available systems are tuned for teams of clinicians that work from multiple locations, few facilitate display of non-radiology images, and few are suited for such tasks as patient education.
— Source: Bradley Erickson, MD, PhD; William Ryan; Dale Gehring; and Abraham Pynadath.

Top Reason to Change Your PACS Vendor: Poor understanding of your needs. If your request for new features causes your sales rep to slide a quote across the table, it may be time to re-think things. It’s important that vendors understand that your system should be able to grow and change based upon your changing needs. New functions five years ago should become core functions today. Whether your hospital purchases a new 64-channel CT scanner or adds a new imaging center, its nice to know that your vendor has a flexible cost and technology model in place to make things work.
— Source: Chris Meenan and Paul Nagy, PhD

Top Myth Held by Radiologists about Imaging Informatics: You don’t need to understand informatics to be a good radiologist. Every radiologist needs to understand the basics of imaging informatics. From quality assurance in the digital environment, to improving your own efficiency, to preventing on-the-job injuries, informatics has the information that radiologists need to do their jobs better. Not everyone needs to be an informatician, but everyone does need to understand the basics of the digital environment that pervades the modern radiology department.
—Source: Barton Branstetter IV, MD

Top Reason Why PACS Go Down: Hardware failures. In a recent survey of database professionals regarding failures in the server room, hardware failures led the causes with 49 percent of the reason for unplanned outages over the past year. The cost of redundant servers has become very inexpensive, especially compared to the damage done to your department’s credibility during a downtime. A loaded enterprise server with dual power supply, dual core processor server costs only $3,000 to $5,000. If you look at the cost of the system, the cost for system redundancy is very minimal. Vendors still don’t take full advantage of modern IT principles in fault tolerance and could benefit from selling that as part of their standard configuration. The simple fact is the vast majority of failures are likely attributed to poor systems management that is avoidable and doesn’t have to cost much to prevent, sometimes nothing at all. The best thing you can do to prevent a failure is to keep a watchful eye on your system and keep open lines of communication with both your users and your IT department. Hardware failures are almost always preceded by many error messages on the system. The question is, are you listening? It’s far easier to recover from the warning tremors of a failure than a complete failure.
—Source: Paul Nagy, PhD, and Chris Meenan

Top Thing You Need to Know about Radiology for Non-Radiologists (from the radiologist’s perspective): Radiology is like the airline business. It requires expensive equipment and highly trained personnel. You cannot be economically successful with either of these components (technical and professional) if the plane is on the ground too long between flights, or if it is flying with too many empty seats. Technology is a mission-critical, 24x7 component.
— Source: David Avrin, MD, PhD

Top Thing You Need To Know About Radiology for Non-Radiologists (from the engineer’s perspective): Radiologists are very complex creatures. We will most likely never replace them with a computer program because of the knowledge, context, and experience they bring to the problem of radiological diagnosis.
— Source: Katherine P. Andriole, PhD

Top Thing to Look For When Hiring a Technical PACS Administrator: Interpersonal skills. A large portion of the amount of work required to get things done in health care IT is done through the strength of personal relationships with other internal organizations. Driving PACS in other specialty areas, such as surgery, requires buy-in from their leadership and IT teams to make it a priority for both budgetary and operational timelines. The technical PACS admin should be able to develop a good rapport with other IT groups as well as the vendors in the hospital so that they can be aware of future IT initiatives that might impact the operation of radiology IT.
— Source: Christopher Meenan and Paul Nagy

Top Thing to Look For When Hiring a PACS Application Specialist: Communication skills. With real estate the key is location, location, location. With PACS the key is communication, communication, communication. In a survey conducted on ClubPACS, to which more than 550 people responded, communication was rated as the most important skill required of a PACS administrator. It garnered three times as many votes as any other skill required. And it’s no wonder given that they communicate with vendors, technologists, IT staff, physicians and administrators. Every aspect of the job involves communication, so it makes sense that an effective communicator will make for an effective PACS administrator.
— Source: Paul Nagy, PhD, and Teri Amelung, RT

Editor’s note: This article was compiled from the SIIM News Top 10 lists and originally appeared in this format in Radiology Today.