Customer Oriented PACS

Abstract

During the early development phase of PACS, its implementation was mainly a matter of the radiology department. This is changing rapidly, and PACS planning is increasingly seen in the context of a hospital-wide or regional approach. With increased networking among healthcare institutions and the growing relevance of teleradiology scenarios, PACS strategies must take not only local but also regional and global factors into consideration. For hospitals and healthcare institutions, quality function deployment (QFD) is a helpful tool for developing new systems or services. QFD was originally developed by Yoji Akao in 1966 when the author combined his work in quality assurance and quality control points with function deployment used in Value Engineering. QFD has been described as “a method to transform user demands into design quality, to deploy the functions forming quality, and to deploy methods for achieving the design quality into subsystems and component parts, and ultimately to specific elements of the manufacturing process” (Mizuno & Akao, 1994). QFD is designed to help planners focus on characteristics of a new or existing product or service from the viewpoints of market segments, company, or technology-development needs. The technique yields graphs and matrices. It is widely accepted that benefits of using QFD in the healthcare industry include: • Increased customer satisfaction • Improved quality • Time efficiency • Multidiscilplinary teamwork orientation • Documentation orientation The QFD method has been successfully applied to many industrial and manufacturing processes in order to ensure that quality is built into products at the outset rather than tested for after their production. However, this method has rarely been applied in the healthcare industry.