Center has been in the process of transitioning from the traditional film-based department to a digital imaging department for the past 2 years. The department is now transitioning from the traditional method of dictating reports (dictation by radiologist to transcription to review and signing by radiologist) to a voice recognition system. The transition to digital operations will not be complete until we have the ability to directly interface the dictation process with the image review process. Voice recognition technology has advanced to the level where it can and should be an integral part of the new way of working in radiology and is an integral part of an efficient digital imaging department. The transition to voice recognition requires the task of identifying the product and the company that will best meet a department's needs. This report introduces the methods we used to evaluate the vendors and the products available as we made our purchasing decision. We discuss our evaluation method and provide a checklist that can be used by other departments to assist with their evaluation process. The criteria used in the evaluation process fall into the following major categories: user operations, technical infrastructure, medical dictionary, system interfaces, service support, cost, and company strength. Conclusions drawn from our evaluation process will be detailed, with the intention being to shorten the process for others as they embark on a similar venture. As more and more organizations investigate the many products and services that are now being offered to enhance the operations of a radiology department, it becomes increasingly important that solid methods are used to most effectively evaluate the new products. This report should help others complete the task of evaluating a voice recognition system and may be adaptable to other products as well. that specialty. In addition, the department supports 16 residents who rotate between specialties, usually on a monthly basis. Nights and weekends are covered by on-call radiologists backing up the residents who are assigned rotational shifts. This configuration results in both challenges and opportunities in our transition to digital voice dictation. We had originally hoped to introduce digital voice dictation on a limited scale, setting one station up in each reading room, to allow the radiologists a chance to test it out before it was implemented in the entire department. We soon realized that such a plan would cause problems for the residents and the on-call radiologists. All of the vendors we spoke with indicated that it is very difficult to move back and forth between analog and digital dictation methods, resulting in much frustration for the radiologists and residents. Since one of our objectives was to reduce the frustrations caused by change, we were hesitant to phase the implementation.Our second idea was to implement in only one reading room first, then roll out the new process to the entire department. This had its limitations in that only one group of...

By implementing distributed archives in a PACS environment, it is possible to achieve a highly fault-tolerant system without the expense of high-availability hardware and software. The design concepts outlined here can be applied to any PACS system that supports distributed archive functionality.

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