Regulatory Compliance

I got a call the other day from a practice in Nevada. The doctor described a Metron issue. A visiting regulatory compliance examiner identified an issue that they stated "requires remediation". The examiner noted that in Metron the anatomy annotations can be changed long after the image acquisition and then made it clear that this is a regulatory violation.

Quickly solved - within Metron we have the option to turn on a "user login" prompt. By defining specific users and their roles we can then turn on and off specific features. In this case we turned off the option to change anatomy annotations after the images have been "accepted". We also have an activity log that even presents the "attempt" to change the annotations and who made that attempt. Similarly we have made it easy to track who has deleted, copied, move, and many other actions. This detail will be useful to help satisfy most any regulatory compliance requirements.

User Privileges

Deleting - It may be that you want to limit who can delete images or empty the trash after deleting. Deleting or renaming a Metron database should be off limits. If you are turning off the option to empty the trash, maybe you should also limit who can "Undelete" from the Trash.

Changing record info - Maybe changing the client and patient info should be limited to only the doctors. Changing the study date should also be limited to only a select few.

Other user privileges - editing DICOM Preferences should be turned off. Exporting and Splitting Metron databases should be turned off.

If you are using Metron Modality Worklist (MWL) feature to generate client/patient studies using data from your practice information management system (PIMS), you may want to make that mandatory by turning off the option to create a study manually. This will help to avoid data entry typos that typically occur when staff manually add clients and patients.