Originally published on JS PACS, April 23, 2009.
Be sure to develop a policy regarding the installation and maintenance of imaging devices and peripheral PACS equipment. Sometimes the line between organizational PCs and medical imaging equipment becomes blurred, and questions arise about who supports what. Consider anything attached to imaging equipment to be your domain, and take the stance that no equipment related to PACS can be worked on without your knowledge. I am not suggesting that you keep your organization’s technical services group from working on PCs around imaging equipment, just that they verify with the PACS team any work they are about to perform, to ensure it won’t impact workflow. Nobody wants to run a dictatorship over PACS, but having information pass through you will prevent issues from happening in your organization’s imaging informatics flow without your knowledge.
Scenario: an oncology PC used for treatment planning was having some issues, and the technical services team inadvertently altered its IP address, breaking DICOM communication. It took a day for the IS team to figure out that the IP address had to be reset to its original setting. Because of that, an entire day of work in the oncology department was lost, and some patients had to wait longer than normal since the department was down to one treatment planning device. Considering that this was a DICOM device, the PACS team was distressed to learn that oncology had been unnecessarily impacted for an entire day. The details of what required the modification of the device’s IP, and how it was done without the knowledge of the PACS team, are still being uncovered.
With an incident like this, it is clearly time to review policies and procedures with all parties involved, to ensure that the organization’s DICOM devices and medical imaging equipment are worked on by, or with oversight from, the PACS team.
Be sure your organization has policies and procedures in place for the management of PACS-related equipment. Also be sure the policy is communicated to the organization (clinical department managers, IS, administration, and so on), as you never know where an issue with imaging informatics may surface. Whether it is a new imaging device, maintenance on an existing device, or a PC that interfaces with imaging devices, you need to know about it.