Welcome. This is the website of Premier Imaging Informatics, which is to say it’s mine. I’m John Sole, and I’ve spent the last thirty years in medical imaging: first behind a CT scanner, then running PACS inside hospitals, then on the vendor side, working out how an enterprise archive fits into everything a hospital already runs, and since 2018 as an independent consultant working with health systems on their imaging infrastructure.
I’ve built this site for one reason: to write.
Most of what I know, I learned by being the person who had to make something work when the documentation didn’t match the wire, or when two systems that were both “standards compliant” refused to talk to each other. That knowledge mostly lives in engagement notes and in my head, where it does nobody else any good. Writing it down is the fix.
What to expect here
A new piece roughly once a month, on topics like these:
- What the DICOM and HL7 standards actually say, as opposed to what vendors and folklore say they say, and how to find out for yourself.
- Methods for migrations, verifications, and archive analysis that don’t depend on a particular vendor’s tools.
- Field notes from production problems, written at the level of the protocol and the query, with the names filed off.
I hold myself to a simple rule: where a claim would be challenged by someone who knows this field, I cite the standard or the paper. Where numbers appear, the method behind them is shown. The rest is experience, and I’ll say so when it is.
The Archives
If you want to see where this started, The Archives hold the articles I wrote from 2008 to 2010 on a site called JS PACS, when I was a working PACS administrator. Dated, lightly cleaned up, otherwise as they were. Nearly twenty years on, the problems have changed less than you’d think.
The first real piece is already up: What C-FIND Can and Can’t Tell You About an Archive. If you work with imaging systems and want to know when something new is posted, the RSS feed is the simplest way. I’m also at jsole@pii.services.