What is Workflow & How Do I Configure It?

The RamSoft software has been designed to work in a variety of medical environments. Therefore, it does not apply many restrictions on what can and cannot be done in terms of system workflow. Its benefit is, that the system can be configured to control the flow of studies through almost any type of clinical institution and can be customized to enhance the productivity of a site. However, to fully utilize these capabilities, the person administering the PACS and managing the workflow of the system, would need to tailor it to the needs of the users.

Firstly, the term workflow refers to the flow of a study through the system and the impact users have on its status. Throughout the lifetime of a study in the PACS, the study's status is altered as different types of users interact with it. Instead of users manually updating the status of studies, the system can be configured to do this automatically. Furthermore, the studies can migrate between machines, as well as different users' worklists, based on these status changes. This section of the manual will give you a general overview of how to properly configure these features and get the most out of your RamSoft Gateway Router installation.

The first item to plan out and configure is the Study Statuses that your site will use. The system contains a list of default status names and a predefined sequence for these statuses. However, these are just suggested values. The status names can be changed or deleted, and their order can be altered. You may also create custom statuses which are more intuitive and familiar to the staff using the system. It is also important to match up the names of the study statuses with those used by other integrated softwares such as the RIS. The information on how to configure these statuses can be found in the Setting Up Study Statuses section.

The next two sections that constitute workflow are closely tied together. These are Configuring Routing / Triggers and Prefetching Priors Overview. Routing is used to automatically distribute studies to different machines by physically moving the studies to the desired location(s). Routing occurs when one of the trigger fields is updated. For example, routing can be triggered by the assignment of a Reading Physician or by the status change of a study. It is useful for tasks such as synchronizing two databases, or for automatically distributing studies to certain system users once the study is ready. Routing distributes studies to other DICOM devices, PowerReader clients, as well as stand alone cache servers. It is especially important to route studies to users with a slow internet connection, as users can avoid waiting for the studies to download before working on them.

Relevant Prior Prefetching is a feature that is directly tied to routing of studies. Relevant Prior Prefetching refers to identifying any clinically relevant studies of a new study and distributing those priors along with the current one through routing. This gives the users working with the studies immediate access to prior studies and eliminates the need for manually recovering these studies.