We're Not There Yet

GE might think I've given up on bashing their flagship Universal Disappointment. Sorry, but I've just put that on hold while struggling with Agfa at the other site. More on that in a moment.

I can tell you that some of our Universal problems have been solved, mostly anyway. We figured out that the disappearing measurements were there all the time; we had applied them to a cloned window, and there they stayed, not applying to the original dataset. Who knew? But our other maladies go untreated.

The PET displays still don't work right, and we've heard nothing about the future of this promised function. The Navigator window still hides when we need it. The leveraging of Windows and Internet Explorer to show patient lists and so on needs some more leveraging. But the worst of the errors remains with us:

THIS is what we see when scrolling to the fourth or fifth slice on almost every CT. It will go away...after closing and reopening the scan three or four or five times. Isn't failing to show scan data a really bad problem? Ironically, this is a problem we had with the original Centricity 2.x install twelve years ago at the same site. What a comfort it is to know that some things never change.

On the Agfa side, things are slowly improving. VERY, VERY slowly. Today, I was able to work at a barely-adequate speed from our remote site. Until the client started crashing repeatedly. In the middle of reading a scan. Fortunately, the digital voice (NOT SR!!!) program stayed up, making it a little easier to retrieve the lost exam. But this isn't the way things are supposed to work. I'm told that there were many "maintenance problems" that needed addressing. Why they weren't addressed before the radiologists had a collective meltdown I can't say.

So, we carry on. Dealing with all this PACS grief will inspire all involved to do better, to view not only gently, but wisely, and make judicious choices in hardware, software, maintenance agreements, etc.

Sorry. Just Kidding. We continue with business as usual.