Dalai Gets A New Toy!and has some progress to report...

Periodically, something takes my eye, and I succumb to the desire to waste money on it. The new PDA phone from Samsung above is a case in point. My venerable Audiovox PPC-6600 is still functioning well (anyone want to buy it??), but it is a huge beast of a phone, and it was starting to weigh me down a little.

The new Samsung SGH-i607 is a svelt, literally pencil-thin device that does almost everything the old monster did, and does some things better. Cingular has rolled out its 3G service which is blindingly fast, especially compared to the old, non-EVDO Sprint we have here. The size of this little marvel is unvelievable; you really have to see it to believe it. It does lack a touch-screen, but I find I'm not missing that much. All this for only $200 plus a two-year service agreement.

As for progress, I can report such on two fronts. First, my blog is now unblocked at the hospital. It seems that they subscribe to a nanny-service, and that service found something on Blogspot offensive. Now that isn't surprising...hit the "next blog" button often enough, and you will indeed see some body parts. Still, it isn't nice to block out my innocent little blog because one of the other 10 million bloggers on Blogspot likes dirty pictures.

From Agfa comes really immediate progress, especially given the fact that RSNA starts Saturday, and I'm sure they would rather be concentrating on other things....

One thing that we began working on even before we left the hospital was a solution for the "dictation race" that we saw occurring in your reading groups, where dictation was accidentally being completed by rads who did not notice that another user had already started dictating on a study. It was immediately evident that this situation was causing a lot of friction for the rads, and so we have identified this as an area where we want to help in the short term. With doctors B. and Dalai, I quickly sketched up an interrim solution for the problem. Both doctors described the need for a notification (Dr. Dalai demonstrated the notification on another vendor's system) that would clearly and unmistakeably identify when a displayed study was already being dictated by another user. I jotted down all of their suggestions, and have a proposal for their review:

As soon as the study is loaded into the Image Area display, a message box will pop up in front of the images: Title: WARNING! Message Text: Dictation is currently in progress for this study.

User options (buttons) available in this message box:

• "Remove from my worklist" - this is the default selection
• "View study anyway"

Now that's what I'm talkin' about! (I like to dabble in current idioms, bro.) There's nothing like seeing things live in the field, with a whiner like dear old Dr. Dalai to point out a problem, and to demonstrate someone else's solution. This sort of give and take should be absolutely mandatory for PACS development. Really, just about any consumer product can benefit from this process. Maybe the Democrats will make it a law?

More to come, I'm sure.