San Diego, CA – November 27, 2004 An in-depth study of five DR Systems customers demonstrates customers are enjoying major benefits from the company’s Picture Archive and Communication Systems (PACS). These benefits include significant cost savings in film use, and heavy, growing use of digital capabilities to view exams and restored films.

The "PACS Report Card" study was conducted by Evan Fram, M.D., MBA. He will present his findings to date at the DR Systems booth, at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

DR Systems believes the study is the most in-depth analysis ever performed of tangible benefits produced by a vendor’s PACS.

Rick Porritt, DR Systems CEO, said the study’s data suggest that DR Systems' PACS significantly improved productivity at the hospitals. “Consider all the time, money and labor that hospitals might otherwise spend printing films, retrieving films when doctors request them, and restoring films from archives,” said Porritt. “Now add in the tremendous growth in exams and films per exam that we see throughout healthcare. The productivity implications of a PACS like ours are fairly obvious in that light.”

The study involved five major hospitals that use DR Systems’ PACS, with installation time ranging from roughly two years to more than 10 years. The exam volumes handled by the PACS ranged from approximately 100,000 exams per year to more than 200,000 exams per year.

Among the significant findings of the study:

• The volume of exams handled by the PACS grew dramatically over time. The volume increase represented both the addition of modalities to the PACS and growth in exams per modality. For example, at one of the hospitals in the study, the number of exams handled by the PACS grew from well under 2,000 exams per month in August 1996 to nearly 16,000 exams per month in April 2004. In that same time span, modalities covered by the PACS grew from computerized tomography (CT) and ultrasound (US) to additionally encompass computed radiography, special procedures, nuclear medicine, and magnetic resonance imaging.
  
  
• Film savings were significant. Dr. Fram calculated the amount of film that would be used if there were no PACS as well as the actual amount of film that was used. The calculation enabled him to determine the amount of film being saved in the hospitals studied, which ranged from 400,000 sheets per year to 1,152,000 sheets per year.
  
  
• DR Systems’ PACS enabled each of the five hospitals to become at least 91 percent filmless for printing. The leader among the five is Borgess Medical Center (Kalamazoo, Mich.), a customer for nearly five years that has reduced its use of hard-copy film by 95 percent.
  
  
• The number of exams restored by the system was as high as 489 per day, or more than 178,000 per year. The ability to restore exams using the company’s PACS means the exams do not need to be physically retrieved from film jackets.

 In addition to Borgess, the hospitals studied were St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center (Phoenix, Ariz.), Jewish Hospital (Louisville, Ky.), Good Shepherd Medical Center (Longview, Tex.), and Scripps Mercy Hospital, in San Diego. The latter is the longest running successful PACS installation with a single vendor, having been in operation since 1994.

The PACS Report Card study found that film cost savings alone have been significant.  For example, Dr. Fram projected that one hospital in the study would achieve a 2004 gross reduction in film expenditure of $1,728,000. A second hospital in the study was projected to achieve a 2004 gross reduction of $1,536,000.

Careful attention to physician needs is central to the highly favorable results DR Systems customers receive, said CEO Rick Porritt.

With the design of the DR Systems PACS, the filmless environment doesn’t end once the radiologist is done making the report. The company’s PACS makes it easy for radiologists to communicate the results to referring physicians – and for referring physicians to view those results – without generating large additional amounts of film.

"Our PACS creates soft copy that is read-ready and print-ready, so physicians have no need to have images printed on film," Porritt said.  "With other PACS, referring physicians are often frustrated with the amount of work they have to do to manipulate the soft copy, so they order film copies anyway.  That undercuts the potential financial savings and productivity gains from a PACS.  The DR Systems approach eliminates so much film use that your old film budget actually becomes a source of financing for the system."

Simplification of workflow means the company's PACS provides more than just an image distribution system.  "It's been designed to be a business tool that improves workflow," Porritt said.  "This enables staff to work more efficiently and produce more revenue for their department."

With a DR Systems PACS, a radiologist or referring physician can easily access any of these images and reports on any computer connected to the Internet. Without the PACS, the films would have to be retrieved by hospital staff from a file room, a time-intensive and labor-intensive process.

In a similar vein, the smoothly functioning PACS eliminates the considerable time and labor needed to restore archived exams -- that is, retrieve images for comparison to current exams. In many hospitals without a PACS, archived hard-copy exams are stored off-site, adding to the time and labor needed to retrieve them.

“The need for a state-of-the-art PACS like DR Systems is impossible to ignore,” said Dr. Fram, a co-founder of DR Systems. “Hospitals today face a perfect storm of challenges in their radiology department – large increases in the number of exams and the size of exams, and perpetual shortages of radiologists and technologists in the labor market.”

DR Systems was ranked the #1 PACS vendor in an October 2004 survey of user satisfaction involving 10 vendors conducted by MD Buyline, a leading healthcare intelligence firm. The company received the highest overall ranking among 10 top vendors in the medical imaging marketplace for PACS. 

Dr. Fram’s study will be presented at the DR Systems Booth #6533, in Hall B, North Building, Level 3.