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Happy New Year - Final post for 2009

Thursday, 31 December 2009 09:13 John Sole

What a busy year. The organization I am currently supporting has undergone some major changes. We had a major upgrade to the MediTech HIS/RIS (Client Server), we’ve implemented digital mammography and voice recognition dictation, and just signed the order for our second generation Cardiology PACS. Oh yeah, another PACS merger as well. Because of all the projects, this was the first time I’ve missed the SIIM conference but I will be returning next year up in Minneapolis and hope to provide live updates like I did from the 2008 conference in Seattle.

Because of the high volume of work, I have been lax in spending the needed amount of time creating content to stimulate discussion on the JS PACS website. However, with the New Year upon us, I am renewing my commitment to push this page forward and making it useful for the community.

Our membership has grown from 75 in mid 2009 to 125 registered members today. With that many people, we should have enough people to generate some interesting conversation and I offer each of you the opportunity to post in our discussion forum, or share a story that can be published on the front page of the web site.

Some topics that I plan on writing about in the first few months of 2010 include:

Lessons learned from the Voice Recognition Dictation implementation.
Review of the Hologic Mammography project.
Updates on the cardiology project that we are about to embark on.
Review of what happened to Emageon this past year.
Discussion of the new Hi-res color monitors out on the market.
Using Macs for PACS
Topics based on suggestions or contributions from other members.

I hope this last post of 2009 finds your systems running well, you in good health and facing good projections for 2010.

Happy New Year!!

-John

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Last Updated on Thursday, 31 December 2009 09:15

Mammography CAD - Standard of Care

Friday, 07 August 2009 07:49 John Sole

As we progress through our digital mammography implementation, new questions are being raised every day. We often are provided responses to our questions through the vendor however, I feel as though some vendors are quick to provide answers that steer us in the path of least resistance for them.

The specific instance that we are experiencing this time is the question of what to do with Mammography CAD data. What is the standard of care in the Mammography world regarding the use of CAD in digital mammography?

As we begin the implementation of a digital mammography department, we are faced with the decision of how to handle CAD markings on digital images. We are being told that nobody stores CAD marking because of the liability that if CAD identifies a spot on an image and that spot is not worked up by the radiologist and it proves to be positive, they can be held liable.

Now, I am of the school of thought that if you make mention of a spot identified by CAD and the CAD overlay is not stored, we can also be held liable as we cannot reproduce the images that identified an area of interest anyway.

We have had this discussion with the risk management group in our organization and it was stated that we have to identify the standard of care through evaluating what others are doing who have been using such CAD systems.

So, I am interested in hearing how everybody is handling CAD overlays in their digital mammography environment.

Let us know your thoughts by clicking here.

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Last Updated on Friday, 07 August 2009 07:52

PACS IT Skills - The Essential IT Skills That Every PACS Admin Should Know.

Thursday, 05 March 2009 21:28 John Sole

What PACS IT Skills do you need?
There are a laundry list of IT skills that every PACS Administrator must have. This site will cover all those skills but initially the focus of what you read will be on what you will need to get through your day.
Some very basic IT concepts that you will need to understand include: Networking 101, Workstation Management, Server Management, and Storage Management.
Those topics and more can be found in the Intro to PACS IT Skills menu.

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Last Updated on Thursday, 05 March 2009 21:35

MedQuist SpeechQ: An implementation begins.

Tuesday, 23 June 2009 11:29 John Sole

About to embark on an implementation of the MedQuist SpeechQ Voice Recognition Dictation product and in interesting in hear other views on how users of the same system felt that their implementation went. Please join the discussion in the JS PACS Forum by clicking here.

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Last Updated on Tuesday, 23 June 2009 11:31

The IP Address defined.

Thursday, 05 March 2009 22:25 John Sole

The IP Address or Internet Protocol address is an address assigned to a computer so that it can talk to other computers on a network. An address needs to be unique to the network segment that it is on, but that same address can be on another network. A few addresses are even designated to be unique to the world and exist only once.

When troubleshooting network issues such as an image wont send to the PACS server, you can use the ping utility that uses the IP. It simply sends a small packet of information to another computer and if the other computer receives that ping, meaning that it is on the network and working, it sends a response back telling you it is alive.

If it helps to visualize, the address of a device can be compared to your street address, which is unique to your town but not unique to your state or country. Now, there may be many 1035 Union Street address in the country but consider each town as its own network segment.

This protocol is found on the 3rd layer of the OSI model.

An Internet Protocol address is built off of 4 octets (8 binary digits), each octet being 1 byte in length. Therefore an entire address would be 4 bytes in length. The image below is an example of how an address is organized.

In an upcoming article, we'll review the various classes of networks and how they work into subnets.

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JS PACS

Happy New Year - Final post for 2009

Mammography CAD - Standard of Care

PACS IT Skills - The Essential IT Skills That Every PACS Admin Should Know.

MedQuist SpeechQ: An implementation begins.

The IP Address defined.

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JS PACS Articles

Radiology Workflow

PACS IT Skills

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