JS PACS

The day of the vendor provided workstation is coming to an end. For so long we have always heard that we have to purchase our PACS workstations pre-built and pre-configured. Well, I think the time is upon us here it is time to take control of our workstations. Your organization can gain a lot by moving PACS workstation development in house. You can save money, standardize workstation build and utilize your organizations software such as antivirus and patch management.

I am currently in the process of building a Centricity 1000 workstation form scratch and want to say that it is not the mysterious process that these vendors will have you believe. We simply purchased a license, obtained the software and purchased recommended hardware. In fact, we purchased a workstation well over the minimum specifications so we know we’ll get great performance out of it.

The most arduous process of building this workstation so far consisted of two issues, the first one was getting XP installed on the HP workstation (see the JS PACS Article on PACS Workstation troubleshooting) and the other was getting the license. The license acquisition wasn’t difficult, just took some time getting an account on the GE licensing system and the registering the Centricity serial number that I had received in order to generate the license.

With the workstation up and running and the license file in hand, it was rather trivial to install the cardiology software. I have gotten it all installed and configured but I haven’t given it the true test of sending DICOM images to the workstation. I am not that worried about that portion of the testing however because from this point, it is just a tweaking of the settings.

The most important aspect of this process for me was a re-affirmation of the fact that an organization really can be successful in building its own workstations and software only solutions can be a viable part of the strategy to maintain workstations and keep them all refreshed. The biggest advantage to purchasing, building and maintaining your own workstations is that you can shop for the best prices, standardize your workstations with regards to hardware and align the software to your organizations overall strategy (virus protection etc.).

How does your organization manage PACS workstations? Let us know.

I agree that this is the way it should be....we should have control of our own computers. However, how do you get by the vendors contention that PACS workstations are considered a medical device and subject to FDA rules? Therefore AV and MS patches cannot be installed until the vendors tests them which can take several months or even years in the case of OS!

I hear that FDA claim from many vendors as well but I have yet to see documentation on it. We pushed it really hard with our vendor not too long ago and never were given any proof signifigant enough to prevent us from building our own workstations anyway.

When stated that we wanted to purchase one pre-configrued workstation from the vendor and we were goign to make a ghost image of it, and install it on the exact same hardware platform (more RAM though). They said we needed to be careful of that and to be sure that we didn't break any FDA approval.

I think that configuration of software on a PC is trivial provided that the hardware meets minimium specifications, that is the part taht would get FDA aproval.

As far as the OS, I don't understand what is taking so long for vendors to get things running on Vista. Heck, we are already tinkering with Windows 7 here.