We know you’re sick of them. So why are you still using them?

Sure, the discs themselves are cheap. But you probably spent about 30k on that CD burner, not to mention the expensive work hours you spend every day opening files and trying to push them to your PACS, and lost hours burning a patient’s whole case file to disc for their tertiary care appointments.

The other problem with CDs is that using them means a file room clerk is the one deciding what cases are considered relevant for the next physician to view. Add to this the fact that referring physicians resoundingly and unanimously hate to try to view cases from a CD… and you have just a few reasons why your facility should abandon this outmoded technology.

The teleradiology department will not give final reads without comparison films – that’s just best practice to keep the quality of the reads high. But unfortunately, this often requires a single, already busy nighttime tech to sort through the PACS and choose whatever they consider to be a relevant study.

It falls to your staff to find and transmit the relevant comparison cases, to scan or fax the hard documents, and to confirm the transfer – all for a service that you’re already paying for. Instead of having the night tech go to the PACS and find the study to be sent, wouldn’t it be better to simply send it once from the scanner and move on? This would free up the tech’s time to tend to their patients and process new ones.

Many facilities have radiologists offsite for efficiency. However, if your radiologists are unable to get relevant comparison films quickly and reliably, the efficiency of offsite reading is severely undermined.

Obtaining relevant prior exams from the imaging center or offsite office image device can be difficult – and when you do get them, you’re often simply handed a CD, which must be opened in a different application or workstation than your PACS workstation. Your work has, in fact, just begun. But you could simply be viewing those studies on the PACS.

Finally, reading cases can get time consuming and just plain obnoxious when you have to reread the case a few days later when the comparison films arrive. You don’t get paid to reread those cases and it takes up even more of your time. If the comparison films were simply available when you needed them, this waste of time could be avoided.

When your vendor announces that they will no longer be supporting your PACS, what can you do? In the past there was only one solution: shell out the cash to upgrade your PACS – a time consuming, expensive process.

With mPlexus software, though, you can keep your old archive and simply send the images to the new one instead of migrating from one database to another. You will no longer have to access the archive yourself to retrieve relevant prior images, so it doesn’t matter that your vendor has stopped support: the mPlexus software will do it for you.