Among the tastiest attractions of PACS has been its overhyped promise to eliminate film forever. At the very least, that promise meant reclaiming the square footage devoured by films and the personnel tied up in managing them. And certainly no tears would be shed over leaving behind the expense and messes associated with darkrooms.
The cost savings! The convenience!, bark the purveyors of filmless technologies. Hardcopy is dead! Reply the film printer vendors: Get over it.
In reality, the promise of a film-free environment is perhaps PACS’ greatest disappointment. As digital modalities have proliferated, so too have hardcopy images. While the speed and convenience provided by filmless imaging are undeniable, the end of film itself is apparently nowhere in sight. Exactly how this happened is open to interpretation, which varies even among printer vendors.
“Do you remember in the ’70s, when Xerox and IBM were pushing the ‘paperless office’ — the office of the future?” asks Timothy Jablonski, V.P. of marketing for Codonics, Inc. in Middleburg Heights, Ohio.
Like everyone else, Jablonski is still waiting for the future. He’s a modern executive, using both a desktop computer and a laptop in his daily work. But they generate, he says, “more data than I’ve ever gotten in my life. A lot of what I do is softcopy viewing; however, I have more paper than I’ve ever had before.”
In other words hardcopy, far from being a thing of the past, is actually increasing. Recalling a site visit to a so-called filmless hospital in Toronto, Jablonski says: “I saw technicians carrying stacks of 14×17 films. I asked the radiology administrator about all the film. She said, ‘Don’t be mistaken by our filmless project. It gave us the tools to manage the workflow, so that we could hold the radiologists accountable to read. Whether they read hardcopy or softcopy, we don’t care. But when the study is done, the images are immediately ready for viewing. Since we’ve gone filmless, the productivity has increased from patient throughput of 4 hours down to 20 minutes. I don’t really care about how much film they print. My productivity gains are done by processing more patients.’”
Please refer to the June 2002 issue for the complete story. For information on article reprints, contact Martin St. Denis
