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Many medical professionals, including radiologists and surgeons, rely heavily upon medical imaging resources. That's because, as part of their role, they need a way to access images for diagnosis, archive these images within a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) and share them with patients, as well as other medical professionals.

While this functionality is essential for providing quality care, what many practices often don't realize are the time and costs associated with maintaining an onsite PACS as their facility's data grows. With increased data comes an increased need for additional hardware, security protocols, IT staff salaries and expenses on utilities, including electric and cooling to ensure the hardware continues to operate smoothly.

For a practice owner, as these costs start to build, and responsibilities for managing hardware become a more costly and time-intensive task, you might be asking yourself, "How did my medical practice morph into a data center?"

With so many picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) on the market, it can be difficult to know which one is best for your veterinary practice. Despite the diverse range of options available, many small practices simply use the rudimentary veterinary PACS offered by their practice management software (PMS) vendor.

If you don’t have a well-defined disaster recovery plan in place, consider this an intervention! Now is the time to put one in place. A picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) disaster recovery plan secures the sustainability of your practice, as well as your ability to provide care to your patients.

On the other hand, if you already have a documented plan, you should take the time to confirm it covers all the most critical aspects of recovery. (Many organizations often address one aspect of disaster recovery, such as backing up their data, but rarely do they have the necessary comprehensive plan in place for recovering quickly from a disaster.)

Creating and sharing reports is a vital part of any radiology workflow. For this reason, your picture archiving and communication system (PACS) needs to not only let radiologists generate and store images, but also create reports based on them.

While many cloud-based PACS on the market have reporting features, they are not all equally functional.

If you run a veterinary practice, you are often called upon to be a jack of all trades. If you are like many practices, you might not generate a high enough volume of scans to justify employing a full-time radiologist to analyze the images generated by your medical imaging technology. As a result, you probably do these reads yourself or rely on other generalist veterinarians to conduct the analysis and come up with diagnoses for the beloved family pets you see each day.