PACS Admin News 27-09-2009

PACS is perhaps the most prevalent form of clinical information technology out there, with so many hospitals having converted to digital imaging in the last decade. But most of the picture archiving and communication systems in place are for radiology; cardiology PACS seems to have lagged. That’s because cardiology is such a complex specialty, combining hands-on care–certainly more so than in radiology–with a wide array of advanced diagnostic equipment and myriad types of imaging and related information. Plus, forces like the American College of Cardiology haven’t exactly been pushing hard to integrate multiple formats into a single viewing platform.

“Radiology PACS is all about storing and displaying images, and the radiologist is dictating reports that go into a RIS. In cardiology, though, pieces of a report can actually be completed while a patient is being treated,” Henri “Rik” Primo of Siemens Healthcare, tells Healthcare Informatics.

Healthcare consultant Scott Grier also tells the magazine that he thinks that “cardiology today is where radiology was in the mid-1990s, in terms of digitization. We spent years porting certain elements of radiology work from analog to digital. Now, we’re at the same level in cardiology.”

Still, there are some early successes, notably at Children’s Hospital of Michigan and at six-hospital Caritas Christi Health Care System in Massachusetts. Caritas has digitized echocardiology and is working on nuclear medicine now and hemodynamic monitoring now, with ECG on the agenda before the end of the year. It expects to have the entire cardiology PACS in place by October 2010.

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