Acquisition side
The scanner room and its PC: static addresses, firewall exceptions, acquisition software that must not be reimaged like an office desktop, and a rebuild procedure for the day the drive fails.
Managed IT for imaging · South Florida
Nextek IT runs the workstations, DICOM connectivity, network and security behind your scanners, so a study does not sit in a queue because a workstation lost its association with the archive.
Serving imaging centers across Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade.
A real person reads this. No autoresponder sequence.
What makes imaging different
A radiology group does not buy a scanner and a PACS and call the result infrastructure. It buys a sequence: order, protocol, acquisition, archive, read, report, distribution. Every handoff depends on a workstation, a network path, a certificate, an interface or an account — and almost none of it belongs to a single vendor.
That is where imaging IT lives. The modality vendor's responsibility stops at the DICOM interface; the PACS vendor's starts at the application and treats the network, the workstations and the accounts as somebody else's problem. When a study does not appear in the worklist at seven in the morning, both statements can be true and the study is still missing.
We take the middle: a documented DICOM map for every modality and destination, a static address plan, workstations built the same way every time, an archive restored in a test rather than described in a slide, and a record of who changed what before a reading room opens.
Imaging in South Florida is rarely one building. A group may read for three locations, keep the archive in one and forward studies over a tunnel nobody has reviewed since installation. We map that first and design around it second.
What you hand off
Application servers, client installs and upgrades, user and permission administration, and a maintenance window agreed around the reading schedule instead of announced after it.
Modality worklist, forwarding between sites, image exchange and the re-routing that follows a vendor or site change. Verified with a real study, not a ping.
CT, MR, ultrasound, X-ray, mammography, fluoro and nuclear medicine workstations: static addressing, DICOM configuration alongside the modality vendor, and rebuilds that keep the acquisition software intact.
Diagnostic displays and their configuration, hanging protocols, dictation and reporting clients, and workstations that stay usable when a 900-image study lands at the same time as a stat.
Image archive storage, retention settings, offsite copies and restore testing. This is the one system where "I think it is backed up" has never been good enough.
Orders in, results out, ADT feeds — and the interface error queues nobody reads until a report fails to land in the chart.
Scanners, acquisition PCs and clinical workstations on their own segments with firewall rules written down, so a compromised front-office laptop cannot reach the archive.
MFA, endpoint protection, least privilege, logging and device encryption where the clinical software allows it. We support your compliance work; we do not replace your compliance officer.
Four sides of the same problem
The scanner room and its PC: static addresses, firewall exceptions, acquisition software that must not be reimaged like an office desktop, and a rebuild procedure for the day the drive fails.
Storage that fills up silently, retention rules nobody has read, and copies never restored. We keep a restore test on the calendar and the result in writing.
Displays, dictation, reporting clients and remote reading. A radiologist at home at 10 p.m. is still a clinical user, and the path into the study has to be as controlled as the one inside the building.
HL7 and DICOM bridges between the RIS, the PACS, the EHR and the modalities. When one stops speaking, the queue tells you — if anyone is watching the queue.
Working with your vendors
Most imaging downtime is not a broken device. It is two support queues pointing at each other. The PACS vendor says the study never arrived; the modality vendor says it was sent. Both are reading their own logs correctly, and the answer sits in a firewall rule, an expired certificate, or a destination table nobody updated after the site moved.
We sit in that conversation as your technical contact: we can answer a vendor's questions about the network, the account, the address and the version, open the case, keep it moving, and put the resolution into your documentation afterwards.
When it breaks anyway
Imaging does not stop because a server is down. It stops because nobody agreed what happens next. We write that down: which studies buffer on the modality, who reads where if a room is dark, which site takes the overflow, what order systems come back in, and who calls which vendor with which reference number.
The document is short enough to use under pressure. It gets reviewed when a site changes or a tunnel is rebuilt — not once at the start and never again.
What we do not do is put a number on availability. It depends on your carrier, your power, your building and your vendors, and anyone who hands you a percentage without controlling those is selling something they cannot deliver.
First 30 days
Every modality, workstation, server, account, licence and vendor, plus the DICOM destinations, interfaces and address plan. You get the inventory and the risk list whether or not you continue with us.
Backups verified by restore, patching on office systems, admin accounts separated, MFA where it does not interfere with acquisition software, endpoint protection deployed, and any account nobody can explain locked down.
A modality-to-destination map, interface list, network diagram, workstation build notes, vendor escalation path and the downtime procedure — in one place staff can find.
A 12-month roadmap ordered by clinical risk: what could take a reading room offline, what could lose a study, what can wait for a budget cycle.
How support works
Call 954-639-4771 — a direct line to Philip at Nextek IT. Email and portal tickets are triaged during business hours. Every managed client gets monitoring, and 24/7 support for our managed clients, so a failed drive at 2 a.m. is already a job before your first study of the day.
Escalation is written down rather than implied: who you call, who we call, and what we need from you.
Service area
We are based in Coral Springs and work on-site across Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade. If your sites are outside that ring, call and ask — we will tell you honestly whether we can support you properly rather than take the work and subcontract the visits.
Questions
We support the servers, workstations, accounts, network and interfaces those applications depend on, and we act as your technical contact with the PACS or RIS vendor. When the fix belongs inside the application, we open the case and stay on it until it closes.
Yes — static addressing, DICOM configuration alongside the modality vendor, worklist and forwarding rules, firewall changes, and a test study sent end to end before the first patient is scheduled.
Yes. Secure remote access with MFA, enough bandwidth for diagnostic images, and read routing that matches how your group distributes work. That path is documented like any other clinical access.
We build and document HIPAA-focused controls — access control, MFA, logging, encryption where the software allows it, and segmentation between clinical and business systems. We support your compliance work. We do not certify you, and we do not replace your compliance officer.
A documented build, a spare where it makes sense, remote triage to separate workstation, display and application, and a swap procedure your staff can follow without waiting for a technician.
No. We are not a PACS, RIS or dictation reseller and we do not claim partnerships with those vendors. We run the environment they depend on and hold the technical line when something between systems breaks.
Yes, without a gap. We collect credentials and documentation first, verify backups, confirm the DICOM map and interfaces, then cut over on a date you choose. If the outgoing provider will not hand over documentation, you should know what that means before you commit.
Tell us the last place a study was seen and the first place it was not. That single sentence usually narrows an imaging problem to a handful of causes before anyone opens a ticket.