So I can safely say we are about to beat the dead ILM horse for the last time.  We’ve looked an this topic from a planning standpoint.  Making sure you have everyone on the same page and the major movers and shakers from your facility signing off on your testing and rules.

We’ve also looked at the cost of storage and whether its worth even purging or compressing your archive.  Are the radiologists or cardiologists going to be happy with a 50-80% compression of what they’re typically viewing now?  Makes sense to me to just keep adding storage. OR DOES IT?

If you’re an avid reader of healthcare litigation, you won’t be surprised if my attitude pendulum has started swinging in the other direction.  We’ve seen lawsuits that have hurt institutions that have decided to keep exams longer than the law requires.  So, even though you’re saving your exams to assist with your MDs in their interpretations, doing so could come back to haunt you.  Especially if there is some missed or overlooked pathology. Yep, keeping studies longer because you can opens you up to all sorts of sticky wickets.

My final point before we lay this horse into the ground is this, I don’t know!  I honestly don’t know what’s best for the patient because ultimately, that’s who we do any of this for.  So we’ve come full circle.  Some of us have great set ups and purge as often as the law allows, not holding anything longer than you needed.  Some of us keep everything because we can.  Some of us have added VNA and have thrown every bit of data into it for our fantastic universal viewers to regurgitate when needed.

My answer to what’s best? Still, I don’t know.