White Papers

This four-part series examines the ways that wireless technology and mobile communications can enhance the efficiency and quality of institutional healthcare, improving the processes through which doctors, nurses, specialists and support staff members deliver medical treatment.

Part Two takes a closer look at popular communication devices and considers their usefulness and effectiveness within healthcare facilities.

Making the decision to replace pagers with smartphones is certainly a weighty consideration. Lives are at stake. The technology has to ensure speedy delivery of the message. Every time. No exceptions. Following are important items to evaluate as you determine the right path for your organization.

The Cardiovascular PACS RFP

Developing a cardiovascular Picture Archiving and Communications System (CPACS) Request for Proposal (RFP) is similar to efforts for radiology with the exception that cardiology can be far more extensive in terms of requirements. The purpose of any RFP is to secure consensus of the requirements for a system acquisition, and to solicit responses from vendors to determine who best meets those requirements.

Defining the RFP

I have found in my experience that there is a wide variation in the RFP process, and that it can be a daunting process for any organization. After all, most documents tend to follow similar outlines and content, and can result in multi-inch binder responses from the vendors. Who, in their right mind has the time to thoroughly review one of these documents, let alone multiple vendor responses! Ideally though, if one takes the time to prepare an extensive requirements document, and the vendor takes time to thoroughly respond to it, then shouldn’t the facility take the time to review the responses? After all, what is the point of the process if its objective is to aid in the selection of a vendor?

Communications is at the core of every good hospital. Doctors need to contact nurses about care of patients and to tap them for information and data. Nurses require the expertise of doctors when making care decisions. Without a good  communications system, a hospital could actually endanger the lives of patients it hopes to serve.

A critical component of a PACS system is its archive and image management system. Increasingly, this “back-bone” is shared by multiple departments, and able to manage not only pure image, DICOM based data, but also related information and serve the complete enterprise. The ultimate goal is to provide a vendor neutral archive (VNA) as it eliminates multiple migrations and can be a true core of a regional solution implementing the appropriate open standards such as DICOM, HL7, IHE and XDS as well as PIX/PDQ. This checklist can be used for a RFP, RFQ or RFI of the archiving and storage management solution of a radiology or cardiology PACS or enterprise imaging solution and will allow a user to determine whether or not a potential archive solution is a true VNA.

This White Paper about Vendor Neutral Archive was sponsored by TeraMedica Healthcare Technology. Please visit their site for further information on their Vendor Neutral Archive Solution: http://www.teramedica.info