Strategic Systems Implementation in a Dynamic Radiology Group Setting

 I believe that PACS will evolve, and we’ll get to the point where we’ll be able to start picking and choosing what we want to be our back-end structure, and the middleware for workflow management; and the viewer. And having a back-end system like TeraMedica will help, particularly since having a company that’s keeping up with the standards will help us move in that direction. And I think you’ll start seeing more applications built on top of that platform. That’s why standards are so important. And if we ever had to migrate again, that migration will be very easy.

Developing the vendor-neutral archive has also provided us the ability to do analytics that we may not want to do in our production system because it might impact production; so we could do some advanced analytics on the system. And next year, we’re going to talk about how we may want to use this as we interface with HIEs [health information exchanges]. We are not yet in one. But we’re going to have a meeting in two weeks about image-sharing with one of our hospitals. In addition, the leaders at major integrated health system in this region are deciding how they might do HIE; and the state of Connecticut is in trials, figuring out HIE. We feel that we’ll be well-positioned for [all that potential activity].

Based on your experiences so far, do you have any advice you might like to offer your fellow CIOs?

The last two years has been very, very grueling for our staff, because we’ve basically redone all of our systems. So my biggest advice is around planning: you have to be prepared for the unexpected.We sit down and talk about things; and we’ve learned from past installations. I wouldn’t recommend replacing all your systems at once. But I’ve talked with all of our vendors, and the one thing they’ve told me in our conversations is that they were very impressed with our planning. They’ve said that one of the things that they don’t see in most implementations is the thorough planning we’ve done. And we always feel we can do better. But for organizations going through changes like this, they should reach out to colleagues. We gladly tell them the good and the bad. So it’s been a ride, and it’s been very good; we’re very happy. And now we’re ready to do what we see as part of our vision. Jefferson wants to be a regional player in radiology; and now we’ve put everything in place to do that.