Products

The following Products are available form Gray Consulting.

Mini-Project Packages:

Three-Step Plan.

This is a simple Three-Step Action Plan designed to help an organization explore the rationale for deploying a PACS-Neutral Archive.

Step One is Education. A one-hour webinar designed to introduce you to the concept of the PNA will help you quickly recognize a number of vexing problems facing most Health Systems with department PACS, and help you see how the PNA will address those problems. In addition to the webinar, you will receive a handy reference document that will list the major features and functions of the PNA that can be used to separate the more promising commercial solutions from the pretenders.

Step Two is PACS Compatibility Assessment. Not all PACS are “compatible” with a foreign archive. This compatibility issue creates something of a crossroads in the planning process. While there are solid, cost-effective strategies for PACS with low or no PNA compatibility, there are many more options available to those with solid PNA compatibility. Information about your current PACS and how you use it is folded into a formal PACS Compatibility Questionnaire that is sent to your PACS Vendor. The PACS Vendor’s response to the questionnaire will determine its degree of compatibility with a PNA. The Compatibility Assessment will set you off on the right road to developing an effective strategic plan for your organization.

Step Three is a Data Migration Liability Assessment. This is essentially a matter of running study volumes, study sizes, growth rates, retention policies and associated business objectives through a spreadsheet that calculates projected data volumes in future years and the cost of migrating that data from the current PACS to a new PACS. The two most important pieces of information are: how much will the migrations will cost and how long the migrations will take. This Assessment process results in a written Report comprised of spreadsheets and the accompanying written summary of assumptions, methodology, results and recommendations.

If you have a clear understanding of the concept of the PACS-Neutral Archive, understand where your current PACS stands with respect to compatibility, and have solid numbers to support a sense of urgency, you have the three main tools you need to develop a working strategy to address the impending data management problems that are just around the corner.

White Papers:

Building a Better Medical Image Archive; Michael J. Gray, Jan 15, 2007.

Technical & Financial Argument for a PACS Vendor-Neutral DICOM Enterprise Archive; Michael J. Gray, Sept 17, 2007

Best Practices Strategy for non-DICOM data in Neutral Archive; Michael J. Gray, Oct 18, 2010

Cloud Infrastructure and VNA; Michael J. Gray, Nov 20, 2010

The Anatomy of a Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) Done Right: The Case for Silo Busting; Michael J. Gray, June 22, 2011

Skillful integration and dedicated back-end support key to Vendor Neutral Archiving; Michael J. Gray, November 27, 2011

The Bridge From PACS to VNA: Scale-Out Storage; Michael J. Gray, April 2012

Unified Approach to Sharing All Images and Records to Streamline Continuity of Care and Achieve Meaningful Use; Michael J. Gray, February, 2013

PACS Paradigm Shift: Moving control of the data from display applications to an enterprise access infrastructure: Michael J. Gray, November, 2014

Medical Imaging needs a next generation, sophisticated Enterprise Workflow Application: Michael J. Gray, November, 2014