JS PACS

Project kick-off yesterday. We've purchased an enterprise scheduling system to layer on top of GE Centricity RIS-IC (IDX Imagecast) from a company called SCI Solutions. The idea is to create a patient-centric experience, allowing patients (especially those in our soon-to-open cancer center) to schedule all procedures/exams/tests at once, resulting in one 'itinerary' of all upcoming events. Also, should prevent patient appearance at facility on multiple days.

This is an MIS project including DR, Phys Therapy, Lab, OP Clinic Appointments, Rehab, although they're being fairly sensitive to the complexities of DR. Over the years, we've built intricate automatic scheduling templates which take into account procedures with multi-day schedules (Nuc Med), patient contrast limits (IR and Cath Lab) and it isn't yet clear if SCI has this capability. It also doesn't allow for physicians with multiple addresses, preferring to create multiple entities - 1 for each address. That won't work for us.

It appears to have a clean, user-friendly gui, if a little overly complicated.

Today is only day 2, will let you know how it goes.

hjh, RT

I think we spoke about this once but I can't remmeber. did I ever ask you if there was a patient education module included? It would be great if a patient was scheduled for a study and an instruction and information packet pritned out for the patinet to take with them.

Also, I'll be curoius to hear how you progress with IDX now that it is owned by GE. I know the OSF Healthcare sytem is ripping out IDX and installing Epic. I don't know if it is soley becase of GE but I know they certainly helped the process.

John

Hey John

The SCI project went belly-up.

The very long list of 'deal breaker' issues we came up with really were deal breakers. A lack of understanding of the complexities of different types of scheduling (they were better prepared to schedule patient clinic appointments, but not multiday Nuclear Medicine studies), an inability to truly interface between disparate systems - the technical issues at stake broke the project before I had time to get all weirded out by the idea of having to train 400+ users in a 4 week time period.

And I don't really know what's going to happen with IDX. I'm not a big fan of GE - I think a belief in their own press makes them less responsive to customer issues than they ought to be. The "IDX" we have now is 10.5 - we've moved past the 'Imagecast' name into GE Centricity RIS-IC (what on EARTH makes them think that naming everything they own 'Centricity'? The MIS Help Desk has a hell of a time fielding requests when all the end user says is that they need help with 'Centricity')

Even with 10.5, we're not talking about a nice, smooth, user-friendly GUI. It's a tad clunky, looks primitive, but it's incredibly stable. In the 3 years I've been here, (other than 2 planned downtimes for upgrades) it's been down once. Due to an A/C failure in the computer room, everything in the enterprise overheated and crashed.

I'm not hearing any rumors about tossing it, and although I'm not at ALL far up in the food chain, the analysts in our group are not good at keeping secrets.

One thing you can say about Imaging IT in anybody's facility is that change comes out of nowhere and turns things upside down overnight. Never a dull moment.

heather

Heather,

Sorry to hear that the project sank, it is always a letdown to get into a project and then see it sink.

I have to say, I am completely in agreement with your thoughts of GE. They are kind of like Nuance; they just hemorrhage cash into everybody else’s products and then wreck them or don’t’ support them.

The worst part of the death of that project is that the system would be so useful to workflows and improvements to the patients getting scheduled for the exams they need.