Does a diagnostic imaging practice really need an RFP for PACS?
I think that RFP’s are still very, very useful vehicles to differentiate various PACS products. There are still some very complicated technical differentiations and whether they are important to a specific organization or not you at least need to understand the issues so that you can determine whether they’re important or not to your facility. System architectures that vary the nature of how the display software is delivered, accessed, or utilized on a platform may not be very important to you. However, if you’re a multi-facility organization you may be very interested in knowing whether or not you are going to have a central archive or whether it is somewhat distributed and how dependent on a network are you going to be. The capability to continue work in one facility if a PACS server goes down in another is an important consideration for a multiple location enterprise. There are still enough details in how PACS products do what they do that an RFP is important from a couple points of
