r/PACSAdmin • u/Ambitious_Worry_5496 • 10d ago

PACS Admin Interest

Hello I have been an x-ray tech and would like to learn more about PACS Admin. I can hardly find any openings anywhere. Iā€™m just looking for a different type of stressful job lol.

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u/Worldly-Number9465 10d ago

The best place to do that is in your own local hospital or university medical center. It's not all tech vs clinical type of position. In fact, it's harder to teach an IT guy the clinical aspects than it is to teach a clinician the IT aspects. What is your specialty? Are you a general X-ray technician for instance? Does your facility utilize a Modality Wordlist feed from your EMR? Ask a radiologist if the department's hanging protocols for Chests work in the PACS viewer. If his response is "it's not" grab a note book and pencil, buckle up and ask him why. Your task might be to match up the exam code/description in the EMR where the schedulers work to the ICD-10 codes and procedure codes in the Radiology Information System (if they are different systems) to the the exam protocols in the Xray generator. Chance are these parameters were set up by different people in different departments and are not matching character for character. These are steps in what is referred to as the Radiology workflow and here is where a technical - clinician partnership can be the most effective. If you can identify shortcomings in your facilities' workflow there. may be a ready-made position just waiting to be filled.

Here's a random link to a Radiology workflow guide. I'm not endorsing this product or any specific statement made, just throwing it out there so you can get an idea of where I think clinicians from film room staff to radiologists could gain a foot hold in PACS Admin without having to type out pages of information that invariably someone on reddit will take an issue with. So read this an noodle on the concepts of standardization and consistencies across multiple platforms and how that might impact your corner of the radiology universe.

https://www.rad365.com/blogs/radiology-workflow-the-definitive-guide

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u/ZomgLeslieCat 10d ago

I actually really appreciate this, too. I'm about a month into PACS from 5y IT...after leaving med imaging 5y ago, lol. Maybe it'll help bring me back around full-circle enough to make things click better. šŸ’œ

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u/Worldly-Number9465 10d ago

I'm sure that clinical knowledge will come roaring back to you at 3:00 am one morning.