A PACS maturity model: a systematic meta-analytic review on maturation and evolvability of PACS in the hospital enterprise.

Introduction: With PACS and medical imaging technology maturing, the importance of organizational maturity and effective deployment of PACS in the hospital enterprise are becoming significant.

Objective: The objective of this paper is twofold. Firstly, PACS literature on maturity and evolvability in the hospital enterprise is analyzed, resulting in an overview of the relevant developments concerning maturity of PACS. Secondly, this paper looks at the development of a maturity model for PACS technology.

Methods And Results: Using structured search queries, we identified 34 papers reporting relevant aspects of maturity and evolvability of PACS. From the results of a meta-analytic review on PACS maturity and evolvability, we propose a model--the PACS maturity model (PMM)--that describes five levels of PACS maturity and the corresponding process focus.

Conclusion: We argue that this model can help hospitals to gain insights into their (strategic) objectives for growth and maturity with regard to PACS, the electronic patient record (EPR) and other health information systems. Moreover, the proposed model can be applied as a valuable tool for organizational assessments, monitoring and benchmarking purposes. Hence, the PMM contributes to an integral alignment model for PACS technology.