Going Independent With PACS..Guru Needed

We have the very beginning stages of our own PACS system, an Amicas spoke server tied to the Amicas PACS database of one of our hospitals. While this seemed like a great idea at the time, we are thinking of going independent for several reasons:

• The other, bigger hospital in town won't send images to our server for call purposes because an employee of the competing hospital might get cooties on their data. We absolutely HATE using Agfa Web1000 on call, and would love to have a unified AMICAS client for all call work instead.

• The Amicas hospital has had numerous delays in upgrading the communications lines, including ours, due to a complete move of the entire IT and telecom departments to another location. In the meantime, referrers who would like to use our system have been put off, in one case for well over a year. Of course some of the delay was due to the Agfa hospital deciding that they didn't have space for us on their database afterall about a year ago.

I have always felt that it is better to be one's own master, and in charge of one's own destiny. We have hitched our wagon to the hospital's horse, and I don't have hold of the reins. Time to get our own horse.

The problem, of course, is money. To set up a full-blown proper PACS with SAN's and redundancy and tape backup for 7 years and a RIS to go with that (hold the fries) will cost in the neighborhood of $300,000 to $350,000. That does not include a place to put the rack of stuff, the power to run the stuff, and most importantly, the people to make it all work. This is going to get expensive, but if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it right.

I still need a guru to make it all happen. I have had a few leads, but with the various delays and what not, I still haven't found just the right person. If you are a guru (or a Jedi master of PACS for that matter), and you might be interested in all this, let me know! Use the comment button below. Please!