Puncture-proof picture archiving and communication system

As we become increasingly dependent on our picture archiving and communicat ions system (PACS) for the clinical practice of medicine, the demand for im proved reliability becomes urgent. Borrowing principles from the discipline of Reliability Engineering, we have identified components of our system th at constitute single points of failure and have endeavored to eliminate the se through redundant components and manual work-around procedures. To asses s the adequacy of our preparations, we have identified a set of plausible e vents that could interfere with the function of one or more of our PACS com ponents. These events could be as simple as the loss of the network connect ion to a single component or as broad as the loss of our central data cente r. We have identified the need to continue to operate during adverse condit ions, as well as the requirement to recover rapidly from major disruptions in service. This assessment led us to modify the physical locations of cent ral PACS components within our physical plant. We are also taking advantage of actual disruptive events coincident with a major expansion of our facil ity to test our recovery procedures. Based on our recognition of the vital nature of our electronic images for patient care, we are now recording elec tronic images in two copies on disparate media. The image database is criti cal to both continued operations and recovery. Restoration of the database from periodic tape backups with a 24-hour cycle time may not support our cl inical scenario: acquisition modalities have a limited local storage capaci ty, some of which will not contain the daily workload. Restoration of the d atabase from the archived media is an exceedingly slow process, that will l ikely not meet our requirement to restore clinical operations without signi ficant delay. Our PACS vendor is working on concurrent image databases that would be capable of nearly immediate switchover and recovery. Copyright (C ) 2001 by W.B. Saunders Company.