PACS downtime drill: testing departmental workflow with an enterprise imaging viewer and archive.

In today's workflow, radiologists rely on the picture archiving and communication system (PACS) to view images. Unplanned downtime causes significant delays in patient care and lengthy downtimes can have lasting effects on patient care and end-user confidence. The purpose of this manuscript is to describe the planning and implementation of a disaster drill where the departmental PACS was taken off-line and the hospital enterprise viewer was used for departmental image interpretation.

Disaster Planning During SARS-CoV-2/COVID: One Radiology Informatics Team's Story.

Disasters cause a major disruption to normal operations. Hospital information systems are often well-prepared for events such as fires or natural disasters. This type of disaster planning focuses on redundancy and manual workarounds. The SARS-CoV-2/COVID pandemic represented a new type of disaster for our radiology informatics team. In this pandemic, the information systems continued to work but the employees, and the computers that they worked with, had to be distanced. The purpose of this manuscript is to discuss the four phases of the disaster planning process: mitigation, planning, response, and recovery. We will illustrate the process with the example of how our radiology informatics team responded to the SARS-CoV-2/COVID pandemic.

Image-Enabling the Patient Portal of an Electronic Health Record.

Today, radiology departments still rely on compact disks to share imaging studies with patients. This practice is outdated as the majority of modern computers do not possess optical drives. In effect, hospitals are providing disks to patients to enable a single use, physical transport between two locations. This practice contrasts with the original goals of providing patients with their images: to empower ownership and provide transparency about their healthcare. The purpose of this manuscript is to implement an online platform for patient image viewing through an electronic health record patient portal. The number of study viewers was recorded daily over the first 90 days on our platform. During this time, the patients viewed 12,257 imaging studies. This represents 22% of the 56,413 imaging studies performed in our department. On average, there were 136 imaging studies viewed/day (range 52-250). We determined that an online platform enabling patients to view their images is feasible. At our hospital, a large percentage of patients quickly identified this feature and began using it to view their imaging studies.

Using informatics to engage patients.

As a specialty, radiology has spent much of the last two decades implementing information systems that improve departmental efficiency and the ordering provider's access to information. While our patients have realized benefits such as improved access to care and reduced turnaround times, there has been little focus on using these information systems to improve patient engagement. In the last decade, society has shifted. Now, consumers in every industry expect to be able to use technology to help them accomplish different tasks from scheduling to communicating. Medicine, in general, has been slow to respond to the concept of the patient as a consumer. In this manuscript we describe some of the informatics efforts we have employed in our department to improve patient engagement. We present these initiatives, corresponding to each aspect of the radiology value stream, from the patient's point of view.