Case study - Critical Access Hospital converting to digital mammography
A rural health non-profit health network had obtained budget approval to add digital mammography to its imaging services. They discovered they could upgrade their entire PACS for about the cost of the mammogram machine manufacturer’s dedicated workstation.
Challenge
A regional health services group which included two critical access hospitals, two outpatient clinics, and a 60 bed nursing facility received approval from its Board of Directors to purchase a digital mammography machine and the manufacturer’s dedicated mammography workstation. Getting the best value and staying within budget were of paramount importance.
Solution
While researching available 510(k) approved mammography workstations, the radiology manager learned of the Mammo ViewBox workstation from Connect Imaging. Further investigation by the manager showed that for about the price allotted for the mammography workstation manufactured by the mammography machine vendor, he could obtain a full Connect Imaging PACS, including archive, web access, and digital mammography workstation software.
Connect Imaging’s proposal also included having Connect Imaging’s personnel migrate studies from the department’s old PACS archive to that of the Connect Imaging archive, making the studies immediately available for review as prior studies. Included in Connect Imaging’s proposal was the cost of providing the PACS interface with the hospitals’ existing HIS system.
The radiology manager also obtained equivalent proposals from other PACS companies for comparison. However, no other proposals had the same range of features to meet the workflow needs of the group at a price within their budget.
Benefits
Installation of the Connect Imaging PACS enabled the health services network to meet all project goals. The group added digital mammography services, staying within the budget approved by the Board of Directors.
Total installation for the PACS and digital mammography workstation took less than a week, including migration of prior studies. Most of the software was installed remotely on existing hardware, including a server already in place. Migration of existing studies was done outside of the radiology department’s normal work hours. This, too, was completed before the service technician arrived on site. His work at the facility was completed in three days.
One week after the PACS had been installed and all data transferred to the new PACS, the server that had been provided by the hospital failed in the afternoon. Without a PACS server, the radiology department was unable to access studies that had been archived, so it was necessary to get the facility up and running as quickly as possible.
Fortunately, the facility was able to make a replacement server available within a few hours. Connect Imaging personnel then remotely uploaded all the necessary software in the evening, and installed and configured it the next morning. Studies from the old archive were again migrated to the new archive; new studies that had not been saved to the old archive were re-sent from the modalities.
As a result of the fast response by Connect Imaging, access to studies on the PACS was interrupted for less than 24 hours, and no studies were lost.
Additional benefits were discovered after the PACS had been in use for a while. Studies were now accessible to clinical staff from either of the two hospitals and the two outpatient clinics. With the use of web-based ConnectWeb, clinical staff could immediately access studies from any computer. Radiology personnel also discovered that the software allowed complex tasks involving the DICOM studies very easily, without confusing multiple menus. A favorite program was the QA manager module, which allows correction of errors in the DICOM header tags after a study had been archived. As one user explained, “Mistakes happen. This software lets us remove a study from the PACS archive, make corrections, then re-save it very easily and quickly.”
