| Site of the upcoming SIIM conference: Gaylord at National Harbor |
which is coming up May 31 - June 2 in Washington DC. I have attended these events since they were called “SCAR” and have seen the changes in the medical imaging informatics industry being reflected at these meetings over the many years. I am looking forward to attending this year again and would recommend it for any healthcare imaging and informatics professional for the following top ten reasons:
1.
It’s a great place to network. We are working in
somewhat of a niche profession. Many institutions have only a single PACS
administrator for radiology, and even though you might have a colleague in
cardiology and someone in pathology who is getting his or her feet wet in
managing digital images, many of you might feel as if you are on a small
island. You don’t have many people to talk with about your problems, issues and
good practices. At SIIM you’ll find literally hundreds of people who all are in
the same boat, many have the same systems you are using, and face the same
challenges with their systems, vendors and users.
2.
You’ll be able to find out “what’s new” from a technology
perspective. New applications for capturing dose information from your CT’s, software
providing Decision Support, AI support tools, and using VNA as the core
enterprise archive are all relatively new technologies you want to learn about,
to find out if they make sense for your institution.
3.
You’ll be able to discover “what’s new” from a vendor
perspective. Mergers, consolidations, acquisitions, new company names and
branding are very common in our industry. If you are using a vendor who is not exhibiting
at SIIM you might think about having a plan B i.e. replacement strategy.
Sometimes it is just a matter of knowing the new name. Don’t be looking for your
ACUO VNA, McKesson or Merge PACS but rather for Hyland, Change Healthcare and
IBM.
4.
At SIIM you have a much better opportunity to kick
the tires than at other tradeshows. Compared with large trade shows such as
RSNA where you must make appointments to get a demo on a tiny monitor with
three rows of people in front of you, at SIIM you can walk up to a friendly
sales rep and get a one-on-one demo of the latest product features. This is
important for new purchases and upgrades.
5.
You can talk with your vendor especially with
large companies, and ask about specific problems, whereas it might take a while
to get your messages through about certain features, issues, workflow solutions,
or alternate solutions the rest of the year, at SIIM your vendors are easily
accessible. Note that this works both ways, trade shows are key for vendors to
collect data from customers about what features they like and don’t like, and
what upgrades they would like to see prioritized in upcoming releases.
6.
Find out from other users about specific issues.
Again, as an imaging professional you are somewhat on an island and you might
find out that a nagging issue is not unique to your specific installation or
use, even though a vendor might say “we don’t see the same problem anywhere
else.” There is a strength in numbers, so knowing that your problems are not
unique can give you more ammunition to get it fixed
7.
Learn a few new tools and tricks. This is my
personal favorite as the learning labs are a great resource to become familiar
with, for example using a DICOM sniffer to find out why a device does not want
to communicate with the PACS or drops random packets, or is using a validation
tool such as DVTK for validating a DICOM header so you’ll know what to fix to enable
a physician to view the image. These workshops are highly recommended, and are very
popular, so I recommend signing up for these as soon as you can.
8.
Understand what’s hype and what’s real. If you
read the social media, radiologists will become obsolete in the next 5 years
due to the increase in Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, we’ll get
reimbursed in bitcoins, and if you won’t have a VNA or deconstructed PACS
you’ll be left behind by the competition. SIIM is a good meeting to not only
hear from experts their opinions, but most importantly from real users,
especially the early adopters, what their experiences are. This allows you to decide
to jump ship and ride the next wave or wait a few more years until these fads
either mature or fade away.
9.
Learn about best practices. Even though most
hospitals are somewhat different regarding practices and workflow, there are a
lot of best practices that can be shared among these institutions. Quality
measures such as ER discrepancies and how to manage these, peer reviews, what
is a reasonable number of retakes, and how to minimize these, are good KPI’s to
compare against. These can be used to improve efficiency, patient care, safety
and cost.
10.
Have fun. My kind of fun is participating in the
early morning 5k fun run, have a beer and/or sushi with industry friends and
colleagues, and sneak away for a few hours or take an extra day to visit a
museum and do some sightseeing. Because of my involvement with the DICOM
committee meetings, I have been to DC probably close to 100 times (imagine 6
meetings/yr for at least 15 years…) but there are still parks, museums,
neighborhoods to visit or revisit.
When you visit, I suggest arriving prepared and set clear
goals and objectives, such as meeting with a minimum of 5 people with the same
system, looking for a at least three different replacement solutions, etc. However, have realistic expectations, don’t expect to come
back an expert. There is a place for tradeshows such as SIIM, and a (different)
place for fundamental, intense hands-on training.
So don’t expect to become proficient
in DICOM or HL7, different PACS architectures, or know the details of using Wireshark
or Mirth. Tradeshows are a good place to enhance your training and career but view
them as complementary to your other education and training options such as
reading textbooks, attending in-depth training classes or seminars.
As a final caution, as you to get back to your own
environment over-stimulated, but as you return to your own system with its limited
versions, capabilities, budget constraints etc., be prepared for some
disillusionment. But at least you can challenge your status-quo and be
knowledgeable and share what you’ve learned! And last but not least know that you
had fun!
