For the first five years of its existence, Tower Saint John’s Imaging, a full-service outpatient imaging center in Santa Monica, California, that is a joint venture between Saint John’s Health Center and Tower Imaging Medical Group, used its own RIS, PACS, and speech-recognition products separate from those of Saint John’s Health Center. The same

Maybe your PACS vendor is going out of business, or the system is so creaky that your vendor no longer offers support. Perhaps your hospital signed an exclusive purchasing agreement that requires a new PACS from a different vendor. Maybe your new department chair just prefers a different system. Any of these causes could conspire to put you in the

RadNet, Inc, which operates 191 fixed-site imaging centers in six U.S. states, has executed a definitive agreement to acquire eRAD, Inc parent company Image Medical Corp. for $10.75 million. eRAD provides PACS and related workflow solutions to more than 250 hospitals, teleradiology businesses, imaging centers and specialty physician groups.

Few processes in radiology are as dreaded as switching from a legacy PACS to a newer replacement. Often approached only when the former PACS is on its last legs, the transition between systems requires diligent selection from an ever-widening field of solutions, lengthy migration of complex (and sometimes flawed) data, and retraining of all

The road to PACS perfection is paved with distractions and pitfalls, Paul Chang, MD, FSIIM, says. Chang is professor of radiology, vice chair of radiology informatics, and medical director of enterprise imaging at University of Chicago Medical Center in Illinois. During the 2010 Dwyer Lecture, “The Role of Imaging Informatics in the Next Generation

For over thirty years, Radiation Physics Inc (Beltsville, Maryland) has been providing mobile imaging services to the Baltimore and Washington, DC, metropolitan areas, serving long-term–care and assisted-living clients, as well as prisons and private residences. “We started doing this in 1976, and the business model has been pretty much the same

In the late 1990s, Yale School of Medicine, New haven, Connecticut, implemented its first PACS. James Brink, MD, chair of the department of radiology and professor of diagnostic radiology, recalls how radiologists initially adapted to the brave new digital world: “It took some of the more senior radiologists a while to get used to using a cine

Sharing images across any health care enterprise represents a challenge, but doing so across the Pacific Rim was the dilemma faced in 2003 by the US Air Force. Taking up this challenge were Lt Col Grant Tibbetts, MD, now radiology consultant to the surgeon general, and Tom Lewis, the director of the Air Force PACS Office. “The largest hospital in