PACS has Innovative User Interface Design

Providing an intuitive platform for radiologists, a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) has made significant strides to improve performance, interface navigation, and ergonomic design.

GE Healthcare IT (Chalfont St. Giles, UK), a leading provider of healthcare information technology, recently introduced Centricity PACS-IW version 3.7.1, the first major solution to derive from GE's Dynamic Imaging. The recent installment of GE's Centricity PACS-IW expands web-based PACS technology and provides additional innovative tools aimed to sustain flexible IT models for outpatient imaging centers, virtual radiology practices, physician offices, and hospitals.

"The performance we've experienced with 3.7.1 has been impressive. The software ‘screams' with speed, and our upgrade occurred with no downtime due to partnership with GE's service engineers,” said Jesse Salen, vice president of sales and technology, Online Radiology Medical Group. Online Radiology's impressive virtual radiology business spans the entire United States, with board-certified radiologists reading approximately 900,000 studies per year.

"[Version] 3.7.1 represents a major milestone for Centricity PACS-IW,” said Khal Rai, general manager, Dynamic Imaging Solutions, GE Healthcare IT. "The new offering delivers innovative new functionality for key performance areas to effectively manage and stay ahead of the growing volume of imaging studies. We're proud to bring such exciting technology to our customers worldwide.”

Significant new capabilities include: (1) Study layout and navigator enhancements, including an exclusive, ergonomic approach to user interface design that improves upon and retires the need for the traditional drag-and-drop interface used throughout competing PACS. (2) Enhanced comparison capability, which enables the concurrent display of series from a virtually unlimited number of studies, all at the control of the user. (3) HTML templates for referring physician result emails, to include customer branding.

New technologic advancements include: (1) Performance improvements for image insertion and mapping, improving upon leading technology by up to 400%. These improvements are important for scalability, as well as for replacement PACS customers to dramatically reduce the time for study migration. (2) Performance improvements for the time to display the first image, bringing consistent, fast performance for studies of any size, from those with just a few images, to those with thousands of cross-sectional images. (3) Enterprise master patient index (EMPI) support, enabling the use of an EMPI (if available), as well as manual autolinking of medical record numbers (MRNs), to rapidly identify historical studies on PACS-IW across the enterprise. (4) Support for Windows Vista and IE7, for all client devices, including referring physician access.

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