I suspect no radiology department is ever 100 percent happy with their PACS, RIS or Voice Recognition system. We are no exception, and decided to evaluate what we currently have and what might be available. We had not done that since we selected our current system about eight years ago. We started by forming a PACS Evaluation Committee of interested faculty and our PACS manager. Faculty were asked to specify if they were supporters or

critics of our current system so we could have some balance on the committee.

Subsequently, we had a full day meeting with another academic radiology department that has the same PACS vendor and is known for its PACS expertise. We have recently requested (and received) the exhaustive RFP put together by another academic radiology department that had an extensive evaluation process – including about 10 field trips to the sites using the top three systems (by their evaluation). I had hoped to do a comparison like I might do for MRI, using a grid with vendor vs. various characteristics (field strength, gradients, RF subsystem, etc.), but this is much more difficult for RIS/PACS due to differences in architecture. So this process is taking a lot longer than we had hoped – and is continuing…