Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Integrating smartphone imaging into a multi-modal, multi-organizational PACS


Gary Wendt, MD, MBA
Gary J. Wendt, M.D., MBA, is a Professor of Radiology, and Enterprise Director of Medical Imaging and Vice Chair of Informatics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has more than 20 years experience in electrical and computer engineering, business, internal medicine and radiology. Dr. Wendt began his career as a computer scientist where he wrote several copyrighted applications for large commercial institutions. A frequent speaker at conferences, he spoke at the SIIM Wisconsin Regional Meeting last October. He outlined the UW Medicine experience in implementing a multi-organizational, multi-modality PACS. As part of that project Dr. Wendt and his colleague at UW, Dr. Richard Bruce, spun off a company to develop a software system called ImageMoverMD that makes it easy for physicians and other providers to upload images captured from mobile devices to a PACS that is DICOM compatible and feeds into to the patient’s EMR.

Monday, November 28, 2016

RSNA 2016, What’s New?

Herman Oosterwijk sums up RSNA 2016

This year’s annual Radiological Society of North America (RSNA2016) tradeshow in Chicago was 
pretty good, the weather was cooperating, the labor unrest and strike from Lufthansa and workers at O’Hare just ended in time for us to get to the city, and the overall mood and atmosphere was positive. Vendors were happy about increased traffic from serious buyers and contenders, and the PACS replacement market seems to be growing. Here are my (subjective) observations:

PARCA plays key training role in nationwide PACS effort in Saudi Arabia



Over a 100 PACS administrators have undergone 
PACS Administrators Registry and Certification 
Association (PARCA) training by PARCA founder 
and OTech Imaging president, Heman Oosterwijk
 (standing left) and received Certified PACS 
Associate (CPAS) certification in Saudi Arabia. 
Image courtesy of Zainab Alalawi.
PARCA eNews – Nov. 14, 2016 – PACS not only improves efficiency and clinical decision-making but also shortens hospital stays, a study from Saudi Arabia has found, however challenges remain, particularly the time taken to find images, recurrent system downtime, and insufficient training.

The researchers wanted to assess the perceived benefits in quality of care of PACS among physicians and radiologists, and assess the perceived challenges of PACS implementation and adoption inside and outside the radiology department.

EU Green lights Privacy Shield


PARCA eNews – Oct. 25 2016 – The European Commission, following a delay, has now given the green light to the EU-US 

Privacy Shield governing how personal data is transferred across the Atlantic. The data protection regulation is intended to provide much-needed clarity for EU businesses.

Accenture cyber security survey reveals gaps


PARCA eNews – Nov. 2, 2016 – A new security survey from Accenture found that in the past twelve months, roughly one in three targeted cyber attacks resulted in an actual security breach, which equates to two to three effective attacks per month for the average company. Nevertheless 75 percent of security executives surveyed are confident in their ability to protect their enterprises from cyber attacks.

ONC offers Health IT Playbook


PARCA eNews – Oct. 1, 2016 – The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is releasing its Health IT Playbook to help make using health information technology (health IT) easier for providers so they can get the most out of their technology investment.

$2.14 million HIPAA settlement underscores importance of managing security risk


PARCA eNews – Oct. 18, 2016 – St. Joseph Health (SJH) has agreed to settle potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy and Security Rules following the report that files containing electronic protected health information (ePHI) were publicly accessible through internet search engines from 2011 until 2012.

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