System administrator responsibilities

The PACS system administrator has several key responsibilities:

Communication

• Manage activities that require cooperative effort between hospital network and information systems personnel, radiology administrators, modality service personnel, and the system vendor. Open communication channels among these groups of people is key.

• Act as the point of contact for vendor service, to request assistance through remote dial-up or on-site service.

• Assist hospital personnel with questions related to softcopy display.

System organization

• Maintain a master hosts list with the IP addresses and host names of all equipment connected on the PACS network.

• Maintain a written record of all PACS equipment, with physical location, hardware configuration, date and time of installation, date and time of software and hardware upgrade, software revision levels, and so on.

• Update the applicable system configuration forms as new modalities, workstations, and RIS procedure codes are added over time.

System operation

• Perform regular inspections to ensure that the equipment is well maintained and operating in a safe work environment (all covers secured, no loose connections, no wires where people can trip over them, and so on). Video connectors must be secured to workstations and peripherals using the screws or clips provided.

• Perform database backups at least once a day.

Study management

• Periodically check the Process Monitor to ensure that the studies are flowing from the modalities to the archive, and routing to the display stations.

• Fix studies that are broken during RIS validation or OCR (optical character recognition). Note that studies that have been manually fixed must be manually routed to the preferred destinations.

• Split and merge studies as required.