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Deploying a PACS: Issues to consider

Application Service Provider PACS: Analyzing Costs of Service

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Application Service Provider PACS: Analyzing Costs of Service

Developing a picture archiving and communications system (PACS) can be a daunting challenge. In addition to having a working knowledge of rapidly changing technology, the system designer must incorporate existing equipment, must accurately predict changes to current operations, and must account for the varying skills (and apprehensions) of a multitude of potential users. Since few department-wide systems are successfully deployed in a single year, the system designer must somehow break the system into simple, yet rational, phases that initially solve specific problems and that ultimately mesh together to form a vastly more complex, enterprise-wide system.

There is also a financial challenge. The system designer must somehow construct each phase of the implementation using components and services that fit within the constraints of a shrinking capital budget. Moreover, those components purchased in the earliest phases must still be viable when the final phases are completed, so the designer must be careful to build the system on a stable, long-lived infrastructure. There is very little room for error in such an expensive undertaking.

Configuring a PACS was never an easy task, but now it may have become even more complicated. The emergence of application service provider (ASP) programs is timely, but the programs themselves can be confusing and difficult to analyze. Is an ASP program an entry point to PACS for hundreds of small to medium-sized imaging departments? Is this a solution to a problem or the latest in a string of tempting fee-for-service marketing programs?

An ASP is basically a service concept, and the name is very descriptive. An application is provided to a user as a service. The ASP provider may be either a company or a computer. To understand this important distinction is to appreciate why there is fighting over terminology even within companies, resulting in overall confusion for the rest of us.

In a conventional PACS, each display station and file server is configured with its own software (the applications that make it what it is). For example, the display applications are resident on the display station, and display operations selected by the user are executed on image data that reside on the display station’s local disk; the results are displayed on the monitor. The file server gets involved in this operation only if the image data have to be requested by the user and then transferred to the display station before any display application can be performed.