We financed the cost out of our budget for PCs and did not use a consultant. Although the chief technologist had planned a six-month ramp up, with dual digital and film studies, after about a week, the technologists refused to do any more film studies. It takes only about a third of the time to process and archive a digital study, compared with a film study, and the doctors no longer need to order retakes that are a bit darker or lighter. Our system serves four different nuclear medicine sites. We have a West Campus site in a building about three blocks away, an East Campus site that serves mainly inpatients, and an outpatient clinical center on one database.
Studies are available throughout the hospital to physicians with user names and passwords.
We also serve a hospital about five miles away that has its own database. With a single click we can choose which database to access. Our experience with voice recognition has not been successful, although the Sudbury Systems RTAS digital reporting system does have the hooks and handles to integrate with several voice recognition systems. Our department was the first to report on Web integration of our PACS, and we use the Web both for on-call studies and for our referring physicians to access studies from their offices. We also were the first department to report on using cable modems to access studies over the Web.