DR Systems’ Unity™ PACS has been recognized as the leading PACS vendor by the prestigious KLAS® rating service in its 2007 Community Hospital PACS Report. The company was rated ahead of all other PACS providers including GE Medical Systems, McKesson, Siemens, Carestream and Philips.
KLAS also rated DR Systems as the highest scoring vendor across all healthcare informatics categories in the 2006 "Top 20: 2006 Best in KLAS report." For the second year in a row, DR Systems was rated the “PACS Category Leader” in the KLAS “Top 20: 2007 Mid-Year Report.”
KLAS Enterprises, LLC is a prominent research and consulting firm that specializes in monitoring and reporting the performance of healthcare information technology vendors, including picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) companies. For more information about KLAS or any of the KLAS reports mentioned, please visit the KLAS web site at http://www.healthcomputing.com/.
Underscoring its position as the category leader, DR Systems was the only vendor to have a score in the 90s, on a 100-point scale. It is also one of only three vendors to have improved its overall scores since 2004. “DR Systems continues to set the pace and lead by example in the PACS industry,” the KLAS report states.
Besides leading in overall performance, the company scored especially high in the category of “product works as promoted.” Among providers interviewed in the study that plan to replace their PACS within two years, 19% stated that they are leaning towards DR Systems for their next PACS. Only one other vendor scored as well.
Other DR Systems strengths acknowledged in the report include the PACS’ overall product functionality, quality of service, and execution of the implementation process.
“Community hospitals are one of the most active segments of the PACS marketplace,” said Rick Porritt, DR Systems’ president and CEO. “As a company focused on scalability, flexibility, and involvement with our customers, we are ideally suited to meet the needs of these institutions.”
Research for the new KLAS report encompassed input from more than 550 healthcare providers. DR Systems led in the percentage of positive commentary. The following are sample comments from respondents for the KLAS report:
Implementation. “DR Systems did a great job of training us and getting us to a point where we fully understood everything with PACS and our new modalities.”
Product support. “The support teams at DR Systems are wonderful and their response time is great. If I put in a support ticket in the morning, I will usually have a response within 30 minutes.”
User-friendly. “The DR Systems PACS is the most user-friendly PACS I’ve ever seen. It was designed by radiologists, so it seems to anticipate what all of the radiologists want. I can teach anybody how to use it, even the dictation module, in five minutes.”
Efficient workflow. “Before Dominator PACS, we had terrible workflow bottlenecks in the department since we have only three radiologists who work in the hospital. We needed a PACS solution that would help us leverage the time and skills of our technicians since they outnumber the radiologists ten to one. With Dominator PACS, the workflow is very smooth and the radiologists need about 30 seconds per study.”
Radiology productivity. “We estimate that the radiologists save as much as 10 minutes per study.”
Interfacing. “I would recommend the DR Systems PACS because it interfaces so well with our MEDITECH system.” “The interface between Dominator and our RIS runs seamlessly. The physicians love being able to launch PACS from within RIS.”
Leader in digital mammography. “When we go to digital mammography, we are going with DR Systems because they have one of the best mammography programs out there.”
Scalability. “We felt that DR Systems had the most scalability of all the systems we looked at. They also were the most flexible when it came to meeting our existing workflow and end-user requirements.”
“The resources of community hospitals can be limited,” said Porritt. “That makes PACS dependability, business efficiency, and return on investment even more important than at larger hospitals. Our #1 ranking validates our achievements in these areas.”
About DR Systems
DR Systems, Inc. is the leading independent provider of medical imaging and information systems for diagnostic imaging centers and hospitals. For more than 15 years, the company has helped more than 500 hospitals and imaging center sites improve the management of patient information, eliminate film costs, and increase workflow speed, all while providing better clinical quality and patient care.
The company’s Unity RIS/PACS integrates numerous tools to improve financial performance and productivity, including: Web-based scheduling, image, report and audio clip distribution; patented, automated hanging protocols for radiologists; and the report format preferences of individual referring physicians