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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.

Whether you’re a practice owner trying to decide on the right image management approach, a hospital IT specialist tasked with upgrading outdated hardware or somewhere in between, you have probably heard about the potential benefits of a cloud-based picture archiving and communication system (PACS).

More and more, we are seeing health care facilities and medical professionals share imaging studies among referring physicians, specialists and even patients. Surgeons are taking their tablets to view scans in the operating room, diagnosing physicians are asked to evaluate advanced medical imaging such as MRIs or CT scans while on the go or on vacation, and specialists crave an easy and inexpensive way to share images with their patients.

Those who want to use Horos or OsiriX as a medical image viewer are sometimes concerned as to whether the software has been approved by the FDA. While we will get to the answer, the real question is whether or not Horos or OsiriX meet the standards required for your specific use case.

Hospital budgets today are under siege. Reimbursement cuts and governmental subsidies, often in the millions of dollars, are tightening the purses of hospital administrators across the country — an even tougher pill to swallow as the cost of care and medical professionals' salaries continue to grow.

Despite these constrained budgets, we've found that most hospitals still purchase and maintain expensive on-site, name-brand, picture archiving and communications systems (PACS). Contrary to their budgetary realities, hospital staff aren't seeking out perfectly viable alternatives and considering new opportunities to save substantial amounts of expense on their PACS medical imaging solutions.

So why are hospitals ignoring these expense-saving PACS options, and how can they break out of this line of thinking?