Monday, Monday...

Korle Bu Courtyard

Our first daily report from Korle Bu!

We had a very good first day! (Well, Erin was under the weather in the morning, perhaps a reaction to her anti-malarial, but she recovered quickly and joined us after lunch.) We had a significant amount of hurry-up-and-wait in the morning. Ben, Mack (PACS/IT), Brian, and I made the trip back and forth to the Nuclear Medicine department several times, waiting on those we needed to see. We finally did connect later in the day. More on that shortly.

While not in transit, Brian and I spent the morning in the reading room with Ben and Dr. B., one of the residents. We were able to solve a few problems, and at least understand several more. Brian had mentioned the problem of multiple clicks required to close a study and mark it as read, and his discovery of the "check mark" button that would do this in one click. (One of those things we AMICAS users have known for years!) When working with Dr. B, we found that his checkmark was greyed out. After some experimentation and observation, we found that the button does NOT function if the study was opened via query and not from a worklist. Which brings us to the problem of them actually USING a worklist. Merge PACS has VERY powerful worklist creation capability. Basically, if you can conceive of how a worklist should look, it can be created. The downside is that as compared to the later versions 6.x, which we are still on back home, the level of complexity in crafting the darn things has increased considerably. I need to have a word with my friends at Merge on that! However, I think I have the hang of the new approach, and I was able to create a simple worklist, "Today's Studies" without too many glitches.

I worked with Dr. B. for about an hour, showing him some of the tools within the Merge Halo Viewer, and he caught on very quickly. I think similar sessions with one or two of the residents (and attendings, and clinicians, and anyone else) would work best rather than try to answer everyone's questions in a larger group. I would like to concentrate particularly on creating departmental worklists and more individualized hanging protocols. That could take my entire two weeks in and of itself.

I spent some time trying to install the Merge PACS client on Dr. B's Windows 10 laptop, but without success. I was able to download an MSI from my server back home in Columbia, and I'll try that tomorrow. Apparently no one has had any trouble with Win 7, and I was able to load Merge 7 onto my Mac running Win10 in Parallels, so it CAN be done.

Now, Erin will tell everyone about the developments within the Radiography Department, which I think are very exciting!

Erin: Very exciting. Thanks guys for making sure I as alright this morning. I am feeling so much better. I met Dr. O who is the Radiography Program Director and we had a great discussion. I donated the textbooks I had brought with me. I will be lecturing the Radiography students tomorrow at 9am on what our Radiography program is like in the States. Also, Dr. O is charged with trying to start more Radiography programs all over Ghana. I learned a lot about the status of radiographers in Ghana and will be lucky to speak to students tomorrow. I told Dr. O that it would be nice to have both of our sets of students interact with each other in the near future. I feel that we could all learn a lot from each other. Maybe even create "sister" programs with each other. Dr. O stated that he is trying to attend the RAD-AID conference on Nov. 5, which Brian and I will be attending also. I was intrigued to learn how similar our Radiography programs actually are. Hopefully the beginning of a wonderful relationship.

Me: I'll close with a paragraph about our meeting (finally!) with one of the Radiation Therapy Docs. The two NM physicians are out this week, I believe, but may be back next week. I'll be giving a talk to the NM residents on Friday. We discussed connecting NM to the Merge PACS, which she generally favored, particularly after we were able to get the client up and running on a laptop and demonstrate its capabilities. She had NEVER seen the PACS in action and was most impressed. (This thing sells itself!) We will, of course, need to defer to the NM Head of Department for approval before proceeding, but the actual connection should be straightforward. (Which I say whilst crossing mhy fingers.) We discussed as well a problem RT has had with importing planning CT's into their TDS planning system,

OK, just one more little paragraph....Never commission someone who was once paid by the word...

The topic of rapid delivery of reports arose at several junctures. Without a functioning RIS, there are very limited options. Merge PACS does have a comment field built into the order window, and a separate voice-clip property. We use the latter to provide instant gratification for the ER docs, and it could work here. There may be a way to use a "print to DICOM" program to load the resident's typed reports into the PACS as a separate series in the exam. It's not optimal but... More on this as we go. Tomorrow we have a meeting with the residents...I'm not sure if I am to lecture them on PACS or on one of the other topics I've brought with, but we'll see. In the meantime, Me ma wo adwo!

Brian: Migaso

Ben: You want to try some Twi already yeah.😉

Me: Did I say it right???😃

Ben:: You mean, did you post it right? Yeah, you did! Will be glad to hear you say that out loud!...😊

Me: I'll need coaching or Mack will laugh at my Southern Accented Twi!

More to come....