PACS
Picture Archiving and Communication System — the hospital's image archive and viewing infrastructure. Every modality's images flow into PACS for storage, distribution, and reading. Pairs with RIS for scheduling / reporting and DICOM for the wire-level interchange.
Why it matters to buyers: The biggest single integration point for any imaging purchase. DICOM conformance + AE title setup is where most install failures happen. Storage capacity, viewing workstations, mobile / referring-physician distribution, and AI-deployment integration all live on the PACS layer. Vendor lock-in considerations matter — switching PACS is a multi-year project.
Why it matters to engineers: Long-term storage (typically 7+ years per state retention law), viewing workstations (radiologist reading vs ED clinical-review), distribution to referring physicians, and increasingly VNA (Vendor-Neutral Archive) layers that decouple long-term storage from the front-end PACS. Migration projects between PACS vendors are non-trivial — image-format compatibility, study-completeness validation, and cutover sequencing are months-long.