Buying a PACS can be daunting – there is little room for error in such an expensive undertaking.
Challenges include:
• A working knowledge of rapidly changing technology
• An unbiased insight into the business strategies of potential suppliers
• Incorporating existing equipment
• Considering changes to current operations, especially the role of the radiology technologist
• Accounting for the various skills and apprehensions of a multitude of potential users
• Accommodating complex practice patterns of radiologists and referring physicians, especially in the Emergency Room, Operating Rooms, and Exam Rooms
• Impact of organizational changes within the enterprise
• Impact of changes in the health care industry
• Impact of the emerging PACS-Neutral Archive as a consolidated multi-media archive for he enterprise as well as the data repository for the image-enabled Electronic Medical Record.
Deployment Strategy
There’s an order to the deployment of a Radiology or Cardiology PACS. The expression, “the devil is in the details”, is very true in PACS deployments. Determining the optimal sequence and getting all of the potential users to accept a new way of doing things is the challenge.
A stable and long-lived infrastructure must be designed. This is especially true for the Storage Solution, if that storage will someday be separated from the PACS are reassigned to a PACS-Neutral Archive.
A successful deployment schedule must string “little successes”, simple but effective changes in the operations of the department whose very effectiveness builds acceptance and confidence.
To be successful, the system designer must
• Chose the right solutions to the right problem
• Gently nudge the professional staff just beyond the edge of their experience
• Bring a multi-phase project in under budget.
• Every enterprise is unique. Otherwise, everyone could buy the same thing with equally good results.
Two-Step Process
There is a basic two-step process to buying a PACS, planning and vendor selection.
Planning includes:
• Needs assessment
• Business case analysis
• System design
• Deployment Strategy
Vendor selection includes:
• Review and refine requirements
• Request For Proposal (RFP)
• Finalist’s evaluations via demos and site visits
• Final section and contract negotiation
Planning
Planning is a comprehensive study to make sure you don’t waste money on your PACS. You must consider:
• Organization dynamics
• Existing technology
• Lesson learned from the existing and possibly previous PACS
• Optimization of the new PACS configuration
• Phased implementation plan including the obligatory data migration
The planning process must meet the needs of:
• Imaging department’s customers
• Department professional, technical and clerical staff
• For both immediate needs and future
Planning is based on:
• Operation data and expenses
• User preferences and skill-sets
A resulting plan and system design must accommodate various constraints:
• Technical
• Organizational
• Political
• Operational
• Financial
Getting all the various stakeholders throughout the enterprise to all agree on the plan is also critical.
The Gray Consulting planning and design process includes:
• Current State Analysis
• Impact Study
• System Design and Implementation Strategy
• Cost Estimate
• Payback Analysis
The outcome of the planning process is a roadmap for implementing a new or replacement PACS.
Vendor Selection – Potential Pitfalls
RFPs for a Radiology PACS are very time consuming to prepare. Considerable effort is also required to prepare the PACS team to understand the responses. A good RFP must describe the design strategy and rationale in great detail. This will attract considerable debate and argument from the vendors, who will want to argue their strategy.
Many vendors today will not respond to a complex RFP unless they are already engaged in the selling process with the facility and believe that they have a good chance to win the deal. Since it is not unusual for a prospective PACS buyer to overlook a number of companies and products, the client may never discover just how good their PACS solutions may be, if those companies choose not to respond.
Gray Consulting has simplified the RFP process by creating a template. The RFP Template allows you to build your own comprehensive and precisely written RFP for PACS. The package includes the RFP on CD, Instructional Booklet, and one hour of telephone consultation. The technical section includes section after section of probing questions carefully written to expose the benefits or failures of the system. Asking for detailed information, this RFP template yields a level of detail the team will need to decide which components best fit the expectations of both the department and the enterprise.
All of the major PACS vendors have responded to the Gray Consulting RFP. Since 90% of the document remains the same with each publication (approximately 10% of the questions are new to address changes in technology or requirements), and the question numbering system remains the same, all of the major vendors have continued to respond to the invitation to submit responses. The client will not miss out on an opportunity to discover the best PACS solution.
The RFP is sent to numerous companies that the team believes has the right components. A careful analysis of the vendor Responses will weed out all but the best 2 or 3 finalists.
This RFP process gives the team much greater control over the system design and vendor compliance.
The Gray Consulting vendor selection process includes:
• Design Review of any existing system plan and strategy
• Refinement of System Specs
• Description of required vendor services to support the proposed system
• Development of RFP
• Evaluation and summary of RFP responses
• Site visit preparation
• Vendor or system integrator selection
• Negotiations