Consolidation in PACS: explicit strategy by hospital and IT managers

Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) must lose its status as a dedicated application that is primarily controlled by the radiology department. PACS projects will increasingly require a strategic vision by IT and hospital management. This article focuses on ‘consolidation’ both in the technological infrastructure and at application level.

by Erwin Bellon, Jan Demey, Tom Deprez, Willem Van Damme, Michel Feron, Reinoud Reynders and Bart Van den Bosch

About a decade ago, digitally acquired images on workstations replaced light boxes with diagnostic film mounted on them. These impressive workstations are merely the visible part of the PACS which has to manage, present and distribute billions of images. Due to its special technological requirements, a PACS was often viewed as a separate system for radiology, on dedicated servers with dedicated storage, maybe even managed by the radiology department. With today