We have many hospitals around the country. Can someone make a suggestion on how I can remotely test a modality at the hospital with sending images to a PACS or getting patients thru the worklist at the modality.

I understand your question such that this is to prepare a purchasing decision. The modality is located at the manufacturer/distributor and you want to know if it plays nicely with the equipment in a particular hospital. Correct?

Obviously this is much like connecting it locally, so the question is how to do the connection on the TCP/IP-level since the systems reside in different networks.

Typical approaches are
a) set up a VPN
b) set up a port forwarding

The major difference is that with VPN, the device is connected to the entire hospital network as if it was a part of that. So cybersecurity measures are a bit more difficult to define and to put into practice.

Hence - if possible - I would advise towards the port forwarding approach. This means, you will set up port forwarding rules in the hospital's firewall, e.g.
<external IP of the hospital>:<port 1> forwards to <internal IP of the PACS server>:<DICOM Port>
<external IP of the hospital>:<port 2> forwards to <internal IP of the Worklist server>:<DICOM Port>

So the hospital will open only these dedicated ports to the outside world, and through these ports, only dedicated ports on dedicated machines can be reached - the external modality is not part of the hospital's network. Also it is possible to limit the incoming associations to particular IP addresses (i.e. the external IP address of the manufacturer's network), so that not any system but only systems from the manufacturer's network can connect to them. This is still not bullet-proof but I would say this is a decent level of security,.

The modality on the manufacturer's site will then connect to the PACS/Worklist to the forwared ports, e.g. <external IP of the hospital>:<port 1> to reach the PACS.

This is enough to test worklist, storage and MPPS. When it comes to associations initiated from the PACS (e.g. asynchronous Storage Commitment confirmation, Transferring images to the modality, e.g. in the context of Query/Retrieve), a similar configuration needs to be done in the manufacturer's firewall.

HTH

Markus

billl...@gmail.com schrieb am Donnerstag, 7. Oktober 2021 um 20:14:37 UTC+2:
> We have many hospitals around the country. Can someone make a suggestion on how I can remotely test a modality at the hospital with sending images to a PACS or getting patients thru the worklist at the modality.