Vendor, system administrator and management, in a new, fully-digital environment
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Attila Tóth illustrated that Murphy’s law - ‘Whatever can go wrong, will’ – is ever present when designing and realizing a PACS. At Semmelweis, a PACS was integrated into a complex university information system, to streamline archiving and retrieval and cut down on film usage. At first, even with an up-to-date network infrastructure, the team had to deal with design errors. There had been misunderstandings when describing and assessing workflow and the theory underpinning actual workflow wasn't always correct. Moreover, there were competency collisions surrounding the question: Whose task is it to solve a partial problem in a huge project? DICOM-compatibility issues of modalities, or problems with transferring images, had to be solved. Mistakes were made in estimating the situation and conceptual planning errors had to be corrected. Training costs and time, as well as the additional workload and overheads during the initial phase, were not adequately considered. But all obstacles were overcome and, now that the difficult integration work has been completed, everyone benefits from a simplified data archiving and retrieval system and faster dataflow.
Attila Tóth, MD, Radiologist, Semmelweis University, Institute of Cardio-Vascular Diseases,
Budapest, Hungary