PACS Network Traffic Control
Economically speaking, it is interesting to see that over the years, the question as to whether PACS is cost-justifiable has not been easier to answer. The early work at the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, as well as at Washington University in Seattle, provided some early numbers and a framework to use, however, a clear “savings-model” is still difficult to formulate. The challenge is that one cannot just look at how much is saved by eliminating film, but that the true savings lie more in the increases in efficiency. Productivity studies by the VA in Baltimore in the early 1990’s have helped in this regard. However, one has to realize that, as Dr. Eliot Siegel from the VA in Baltimore strongly advocates, one has to re-engineer a department and its workflow to make use of the advantages of this new technology to really realize the benefits. As one can imagine, the early PACS only replaced their film-based operation with a softcopy environment without emphasizing re-engineering. That brings us to one of the big “drivers” in this technology: network standardization. In the early 1980’s, there was no one single standard. Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) was just one of the several options available. The United States government was pushing for the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) standard.