While helping to steer 105-bed Western Reserve Hospital in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, toward a remotely hosted PACS solution, Jeffrey Unger, MD, repeatedly voiced one crucial concern: Would he and his fellow radiologists have to wait at their workstations, precious seconds ticking away, while PACS servers sitting hundreds of miles away processed massive datasets?

There is no doubt that vendor neutral archives (VNAs) have gained favor over the last several years in managing medical images. But there is some debate over whether hospitals really need both a VNA and a PACS. If PACS can do double duty as VNA and PACS, why do you need both? As we see it, you don’t, as long as you have a true enterprise PACS and here’s why.

In an effort to further its commitment to healthcare, IntellaPACS, a leading provider of cloud-based PACS software, has changed its corporate name to Emergent Connect.

Nearly two decades ago, the PACS race was on in Southern California’s Inland Empire. The main event pitted the regional medical center, 439-bed Riverside County Regional Medical Center, against the larger 719-bed Loma Linda University Medical Center (LLUMC). In 1998, Riverside won the race by about six months, installing the first PACS in the region and, in the process, becoming the first hospital in the U.S. to select Sectra PACS.

It was early 2015 when the team at Carilion Clinic decided they had outgrown their PACS and needed to replace their decade-old system.

The rapid adoption of PACS allowed the medical industry to watch the first specialty digitize before our eyes: radiology. While the economic and clinical benefits are substantiated and accepted by nearly all, Bob Wachter focuses on a different element; how they've affected the place of the radiologist within the care center. 

An aging, chronically ill population and the increasingly quick adoption of technology are contributors to the medical imaging management market's growth in the next five years, which will reach $5.78 billion by 2021, according to a Markets and Markets report.

Three PACS veterans share future hopes and past disappointments about radiology’s great gift to the digital healthcare enterprise