This post will have nothing to do with PACS, yet at the same time, it will have everything to do with PACS.

Our phone system, a Nortel BCM, has given us fits over the past two months. And I am not referring to the constant ongoing nuisance problems we have always had with it, the ones we simply learned to work around most of those. We have a fair sized and busy booking department, and two months ago their lives began to get a lot worse. Many patients would complain that they were on hold for a lengthy time, or disconnected. Once we looked into the issue, it seemed that one of the two PRI’s we have from Telus, the phone company, was not allowing inbound calls. Weeks went by where blame was passed between our phone vendor (Cardinal Communications) and Telus. The finger pointing was reaching dizzying proportions, when finally our tech from Cardinal noticed a setting on our BCM that was incorrect. Suddenly most of our phone system problems disappeared.

It is hard to blame this tech from Cardinal, as he had been in constant contact with Nortel’s tech support. Many different calls to different Nortel reps missed this configuration issue. It was only when it got escalated to a higher level of Nortel support did they have the answer.

Meanwhile, during this period of finger pointing and blame passing, our clients, the patients and their referring doctors, had gotten quite upset with us as a company. So much so that the mandate came down to “fix the phone system at all costs”. Thus, even though the major issue did get resolved, the remaining annoyances needed to be fixed as well, or else we were going to do a full swap out to a completely new phone system. We gave our vendor a bit more time, but when they were unable to make any more headway, had a new vendor come in and assess the situation. They came in last week and made four changes to our phone system (each fairly small), and we waited. We are still waiting as a matter of fact. Waiting for something to go wrong with the phone system. It appears, so far, that they solved the remaining problems with the phone system.

It is quite telling that a new vendor, unfamiliar with our systems and our problems, can fix in one night, what an existing vendor, intimately familiar with our systems/problems has been unable to do for months. I think this speaks less of the technical competency of either vendor, and more about how getting a fresh set of eyes on a problem can go a long way to solving said problem. Unfortunately for our previous vendor, they only really had one tech to support us. Had they had more support for him, perhaps another person from Cardinal would have tried what ultimately seems to have fixed us.

This significantly relates to PACS systems and vendors. With our mini PACS, we have already had a few small cases where some passing of the buck has occurred. Such issues are just bound to escalate as the stakes get raised. I think it speaks volumes to aligning your company with larger vendors that have the resources to get issues fixed. Sure, sometimes the small vendor has something very attractive, but it may be only a matter of time before the small vendor is unable to solve an issue or two for you in a timely fashion.

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