Can a Ris/Pacs System Really Improve Execution and Reporting Times?

A study of the process timing and organization has been done in a Radiology Department where Radiology Information System (RIS) and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) are working. The workflow times have been directly read from RIS database. In particular, Execution and Reporting steps were considered. Afterwards, data have been analyzed through a statistical elaboration and results were com-pared with data, coming from studies performed on similar process, collected with a stopwatch method. Pos-sible “bottlenecks” can be evidenced in the process structure. Moreover, comparing hospitals with the same RIS/PACS system, different internal organization is emphasized.