CTSC:ARRA.012511

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Agenda

• MGH query process
• Feedback from CHB meeting about policies for PACS access
• Policies and Procedures for PACS access at each institution

Harvard Catalyst Medical Informatics group Meeting Minutes January 25, 2011

In attendance:

• Bill Wang
• Shawn Murphy
• Vincent Roch
• Charles McGow
• Steve Pieper
• Valerie Humblet
• Wendy Plesniak
• Darren Sack
• Bill Tellier
• Yong Gao
• Bill Hanlon
• Alex Zeitsev (phone)
• Chris Herrick (phone)
• Dan Marcus (phone)
• Paul Lamonica (phone)

MGH query process

At MGH, it is a multi-node PACS. For performance reason, queries should be spread over separate nodes, access the system through 2 getaways. Issue with those 2 gateways, they only hold about 14 months of studies so far. If one is looking for older studies you need to do the query through multi points of entry to access the deep archives. Individual studies are never split but patients may be split.

Feedback from CHB meeting

Charles gave a summary of the meeting with the CHB Radiology Department to discuss issues linked to image sharing. The Radiology would have to comply with the whole hospital policy. If the hospital agrees that the Department has a right to allow or not to share images, we might need to create another column with an "allow" button. It would be reasonable for them to ask to restrict the hours of the query (not during peak hours, no more than x query at a time etc). So it is important to understand they requirements to be able to build the right tool if necessary. Right now anybody who has an IRB could be able to access all images. There must be a decision on where to put the approval process is it per user, per study, per IRB approval, per imaging study? The easiest would be to allow per user but it is probably not the solution the department would prefer.
For now, no restriction for time of access but it would be better to do those queries at night.

Policies and Procedures for PACS access at each institution

• Can we count on the fact that archives would have another IP address so we can use this mechanism to make sure we don't overtax the archives? Users never know where images are, it is invisible to them but it is important to learn for an architecture point of view. Even more practical than IP address, we could be able to use the AE title to distinguish when and how quickly we can download images. For each EA title we have to do a query in order to accumulate all the studies. In the configuration file it will tell us you can go between x and y, at this time of the week and at this rate.
• We have a scheduling tool built in so it is easy to put the schedule in place. We can specify break time so we can control the rate.
• Limit of images per study: should we limit it? We still need to discuss that issue.