Environmental Characteristics
The research findings were grouped into three categories: environmental characteristics, system characterisitics, and opportunities for reconceptualization and redesign. The following summarizes the environmental characteristic findings.
Doctors as Migrant Workers - In many hospital environments, radiologists rotate among multiple workstations within a reading room; sharing their physical workstation with other doctors.
Constant Interruptions - Radiologists are subject to constant interruptions from technologists, secretaries, referring physicians, and other radiologists. Radiologist workflow supports interruption at certain points, such as immediately following the dictation of a study, but interruptions can be costly when they occur, for example, in the middle of dictation.
Load Balancing - Radiologists are assigned to cover specific types of studies (by modality, for example) on a daily basis. These different modalities may experience significant variation in patient load, which can leave one radiologist swamped with cases while another may be relatively idle.
Supporting Ongoing Analog-to-Digital Transition - The CMU team observed the use of Centricity RA-1000 in both a highly mature, filmless environment and also in a hospital that had only recently made the transition from film to PACS. The hospital that was still within the early stage of integration utilized paper and film alongside PACS, in some cases even having completely parallel paper and digital workflows.
Living on the Network - PACS systems live in a networked environment, and must communicate with multiple systems employing diverse technologies from different vendors. Hospital systems are likely to buy software from a variety of vendors and the ability to integrate with other software solutions on the same workstation is vital.