AGFA PACS User Group 
2003 Meeting

Impax RIS Presentation was made by Lenny Reznick regarding Agfa’s RIS offering for the North American market. There was mixed reaction as to whether this was something that would be of interest to sites in the near term as most sites have an existing RIS. Several people did say they were unhappy with their current RIS but did not have plans to replace in the near future.

R4.1 to R4.5 Migration Presentation made by John Saba.  Was received very well with a lot of dialogue regarding down time and the use of a travelling server which when used at New England Baptist reduced the downtime from 36 hrs to 2 hrs for the customer. The main issue was concerning what does not migrate for example User Wizards, W/L presets, Keywords, User Toolbars. The System Administrator from NEB spoke to this issue and everything except W/L presets were migrated. The monitor resolution settings in the Impax config.exe have changed to 1.3 MP, 3MP, 5MP instead of the 1k and 2k settings. This meant that the icons on the 1k stations were slightly larger than before causing some users top toolbar to expand to three lines instead of two. There was also a lot of discussion regarding service-related communication between Agfa and APUG. Access to PowerHelp and Service Bulletins is a must, as well as some way of letting the APUG membership know about how migrations went. The feeling regarding the latter topic was that the site(s) involved would be the best people to publish their experience on the APUG listserv to share with their colleagues. Agfa is working on getting extranet access to MedNet so that customers will have the ability to access documents etc.

R 4.5 Features, Select and Display Chris Townend gave a demonstration of some of the key features in R4.5 form the System Administrator perspective. These included Study Arrived Rules, Schedule, Finder Favourites, Wizards in Display, Hanging Protocols, Keyboard hot keys, Compare mode and Study Summary.

Impax Futures Chris Click presented some of the features in the current product and moving forward for DS3000, Web1000, PacsWatch.

Agfa/APUG Communications & Enhancement Process Due to technical problems a demonstration of the APUG listserv was not possible. Instead Anna Marie Mason gave an overview of the settings that can be customized by the user when they enroll with APUG.

APUG Business Meeting and Luncheon      

Breakout Groups

1.  System Administrator Tools Richard Jung gave a partial demonstration of PacsWatch3 (this was foreshortened due to technical difficulties. The rest of the session was spent discussing the new (R4.5) Service Tools and some of the user issues with the current ones.

2.  Workstation GUI Tools       A demo DS3000 station was used to interactively discuss the current toolset with regards to what the users liked and disliked.

Breakout Reports, Q & A, and Concluding Remarks The consensus of the group was that the breakout sessions were very useful but not enough time was allocated to them. Also the APUG members would like to see more breakout groups for other products such as Talk Technology, Web1000, Cardio3000, OT3000 as well as DS3000 and Service Tools. Discussion as to whether the meeting should focus on breakout sessions and not include Agfa presentations was engaged. The majority thought it was best to include both, as some of the breakout session issues could be addressed as part of the presentations. From this discussion the length of the APUG meeting was then discussed. The majority of APUG members said they would prefer to have a longer APUG meeting at SCAR than have regional meetings due to the cost of attending multiple meetings per year and also their availability to attend them. The conclusion was to request the meeting be held over two days prior to the next SCAR meeting (Vancouver 2004).

The meeting was well attended with about 50 APUG members present (actual # to follow). The meeting was held for the most part in a very positive and constructive atmosphere.

 Following the request for a longer meeting to be held at the next SCAR conference. The APUG meeting at SCAR 2004 in Vancouver will be held over 1.5 days allowing attendees travel time in the morning of the first day.