Seth Hall, Presenter: Nothing to Disclose

Jonathan Borders, Abstract Co-Author: Nothing to Disclose

Jay A. Moskovitz MS, Abstract Co-Author: Nothing to Disclose

Timothy OConnor MBA, Abstract Co-Author: Nothing to Disclose

Alex Towbin MD, Abstract Co-Author: Nothing to Disclose

Hong Yang, Abstract Co-Author: Nothing to Disclose

In today’s health-care environment where PACS and related clinical systems are mission-critical applications for the delivery of patient care, the need to convey information related to system availability is paramount. In some cases, even the smallest downtime can significantly impact the quality of care provided to patients. With the growth of multidisciplinary patient care, the clinical workplace has become a more geographically distributed environment. These factors make it difficult but necessary to communicate effectively when critical systems such as PACS experience downtime. In response to these issues, an electronic Radiology Alert System (RAS) was created with the purpose of notifying users instantly of system issues, impending system unavailability, and subsequent system availability.

The use of an easy-to-use computerized alerting system can facilitate better department communication while improving user satisfaction during critical system events.

The RAS has been in use for more than 2 years. Since its deployment more than 211 critical notifications have been sent to a variety of departmental groups. The notifications included events during both planned and unplanned downtimes for PACS, RIS, EMR and related ancillary systems. The RAS has proven to be an effective method of simultaneous delivery of critical information to a large radiology department over 11 geographically distinct locations. During this period, the use of the RAS has improved user satisfaction with communication during system downtime. In addition, during critical system outages, the RAS has allowed the informatics staff to spend more time focused on downtime procedures and bringing affected systems back online.

The RAS solution we have created comprised of the following components: 1) a secure, web-based alert administration website that allows the radiology staff to create, manage and send structured alerts to specified groups of users; 2) a workstation client application that consists of an alert polling engine and the graphical user interface; and 3) a relational database management system used to store RAS configuration information as well as alerts metadata.

Hall, S, Borders, J, Moskovitz, J, OConnor, T, Towbin, A, Yang, H, Radiology Alerting System: A Tool to Rapidly Notify Users of System Downtime.  Radiological Society of North America 2012 Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting, November 25 - November 30, 2012 ,Chicago IL. http://archive.rsna.org/2012/12029019.html