Meeting the challenge of continually growing imaging storage requirements

Andrew (A.J.) Braga

It is the nature of the PACS administrator job to be continually focused on storage. After all storage is part of the job title. Over the last decade, advances in imaging technology and storage solutions have put more pressure than ever before on PACS engineers and administrators to stay ahead of storage needs. To get the perspectives of working PACS administrators on the ongoing challenges of storage, PARCA eNews talked with Andrew (A.J.) Braga, PACS and Interfaces Manager and Alex Marmolejos, PACS Engineer at Southwest Diagnostic Imaging (SDI), a group of radiology practices covering the Scottsdale and Phoenix Arizona area.

SDI includes Valley Radiologist, Scottsdale Medical Imaging and East Valley Diagnostic Imaging. Together they operate 32 radiology clinics with a combined volume of 2.3 million images per year. At SDI Andrew Braga manages a team of six PACS professionals and 3 HL7 engineers serving 150 radiologists.

PARCA certification bootcamp prepares S. Africa PACS admins for the future in medical informatics

PARCA and In2pacs bootcamp participants

PARCA eNews – May 24, 2018 – In2pacs Academy, the leading PACS administrator training organization in South Africa hosted a bootcamp with PARCA founder Herman Oosterwijk April 24-26 at the Hotel Verde in Cape Town. The bootcamp was capped by a proctored exam for CPAS certification.

In2pac Academy principal Clive Daniell said the bootcamp was a great success.

“There were 20 candidates who did the bootcamp and 18 wrote the exam,” Daniell said in a Skype interview with PARCA eNews. “Of those, 10 were certified from S. Africa and 1 from Zimbabwe.”

First woman elected to chair American College of Radiology

Dr. Geraldine McGinty

PARCA eNews – May 18, 2018 – The American College of Radiology (ACR) Board of Chancellors has elected Geraldine McGinty, MD, MBA, FACR , as chair. McGinty is the first woman elected chair of the board in the nearly 100-year history of the ACR.

Also elected were Howard B. Fleishon, MD, MMM, FACR, who will serve as vice chair, James A. Brink, MD, FACR, who will serve as president and Marta Hernanz-Schulman, MD, FACR, FAAP, who will serve as vice president. The new officers took office at the ACR 2018 Annual Meeting held in Washington, DC.

Separating the promise from the hype about artificial intelligence in healthcare

Kismet robot – image via creative commons copyright –
via Wikipedia

PARCA eNews – May 28, 2018 – To cut through the hype, assess the potential realistic implications of AI applications in health and healthcare, and understand the risks, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, turned to JASON, an independent group of scientists and academics.

Secure API Server Showdown Winner Announced

Winner helped to find security weaknesses in database

PARCA eNews – May 17, 2018 – The Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) today announced the Stage 2 winner of the “Secure API Server Showdown” Challenge. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are technology that allow one software program to access the services provided by another software program. The 21st Century Cures Act calls for the development of APIs that do not require “special effort” for developers to access and exchange health information.

Information Commisioner’s Office clarifies GDPR special category data

PARCA eNews – May 28, 2018 – The Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s independent body set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, published an explanation about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that went into effect May 25 in the European Union (EU).

Companies that collect data on citizens in the EU need to comply with the new regulations governing the collection and security of private data, but concerns over what data was considered special category data has been raised.

HiMSS offers free interoperability environmental scan

The Interoperability Environmental Scan offers a range of details about the method of exchange, the stakeholders and processes involved by a variety of organizations addressing interoperability issues. The scan allows users to select and compare different organizations approach to interoperability for a variety of criteria. For example users can compare the interoperability approaches for, say governance and website for Epic’s Care Everywhere to Community HIE.

KLAS report highlights challenges for medical information exchange in UK

PARCA eNews – May 28, 2018 – KLAS the healthcare IT research organization has issued its report on interoperability, data sharing obstacles and progress of the National Health Service (NHS) of the United Kingdom. 

The report looks at the progress made and the remaining challenges in the NHS’s Five-Year Forward program aimed at improving medical information exchange across the NHS. The report examines how well primary, secondary, mental health, community and social care organizations within the NHS are able to receive patient data with regard to electronic data sharing.