Clinicians press for more standard CD-ROMs

Now why isn’t this a surprise 🙂

It comes as a huge disappointment that PACS users today still face problems with CDs or DVDs that are brought by visiting patients, especially CT and MRI. The article lists several other issues faced by physician on the same topic, including

• Anti-Virus restricting the launch of the CD (this really is a catch-22 issue)
• Images contained in the CD are JPEGS instead of DICOM (or another proprietary format)
• Lack of tools on the DICOM viewer included in the CDs (e.g Ability to perform window and level of images)

And I’d like to add a few of my own (from experience)

• The lack of a DVD drive (Hospitals administrators, don’t ‘save costs’ by crippling efficiency
• Burning the CDs at a higher speed and older CD-roms cannot read them
• CDs not auto-launching (and radiologist having no idea what icon to click)

I’m sure there are more horror stories out there but I’ll leave it for now and instead encourage vendors (or even you- the reader) to come up with a better system for sharing images with referring physicians / fellow radiologists.

Cheers