ClubPACS Taking the fear out of the filmless

Many of us are hurrying to complete projects and trying to talk our co-workers into taking the pager as we get ready for this year's Society for Imaging Informatics Meeting (SIIM) next week in Seattle. Are you planning on attending the meeting and what types of things are you hoping to see?

At the recent meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMMS) in Orlando, both Google and Microsoft announced plans to enter the Healthcare IT space. Baseline Magazine ran this article on both technology giants' plans for the future.

If you haven't had a chance to visit any of the ClubPACS local chapter sites, a good place to start is ClubPACS Western Michigan . Ron Sweeney has done some amazing things with some of the coolest open source tools available.

A recent web article discusses the top ten certification myths surrounding the Certified Imaging Informatics Professional (IIP) exam. This exam, first given at last year's meeting of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) seeks to provide a comprehensive validation of knowledge and competence in medical imaging informatics. Are you certified yet?

It's clear that rising healthcare costs could have an adverse effect on the US economy. Quicker IT adoption and better integration could help solve some of the problem, however systems integration in today's healthcare IT can be a challenge. This great blog provides some insight on how poor systems integration could be contributing to the national healthcare crisis .

The Society for Imaging Informatics or SIIM has recently updated their open source resources page. Included is a link to the Journal of Digital Imaging's special supplement on open source with open access to journal articles.

Many of us are powerless to change the software features that influence a user's PACS experience, however we can influence the way our users experience the support of PACS software. This article creates a nice list of things you can do to deliver great customer service and really improve the way people experience software support.

If the Chairman or CIO hasn't already approached you for a strategy for Enterprise PACS, chances are they soon will. There are significant challenges however including disparate medical record numbers, accession numbers for outside departments and performance for image delivery to remote sites.

Health Imaging magazine's recent article on Enterprise PACS provides some good case studies of the problem for a variety of sites.

What makes a good PACS administrator who is both in tune with users and technology? This Aunt Minnie article reports on a 2007 SIIM talk about the 12 keys to the Zen of PACS administration .