I was driving to work this morning and I started thinking about how much it sucks to setup a new modality on our network. Every time something new comes along we have to contact every modality vendor and get them to add the new machines settings, because we are not given the usernames and passwords to add them ourselves. This means you need to contact about 5 different people and try and organise time on the modality. In the end it normally takes anything from 1 to 2 weeks to get everything communicating.
Wouldn't it be great if someone came up with a DHCP protocol for the DICOM standard that would allow for a centralised management area of all modalities and their configuration settings. Imagine adding a new modality to the network and all you have to do is give the technician the DCM-DHCP server details and boom! all your DICOM settings are downloaded to that machine. Then all you need to do is add the new modality to the DCM-DHCP server and all the other modalities can now communicate with it!
I don't think this would be difficult to implement and security could be added to prevent "rouge modalities" from entering the network. With a system of centralised DICOM configuration and management life would be a lot easier for everyone, including the vendors.
