Rooms & PACS

Overview

Rooms are how the Clinical Platform models schedulable space and equipment. PACS connects imaging modalities to your organization’s study archive so captured DICOM flows back into Avara for reading, sharing, and patient access.

Together, rooms and PACS tie appointment scheduling to real-world imaging workflows — from a single boutique scanner to hospital-scale volume.

Rooms

A room is a general-purpose scheduling object. It represents a bookable resource on your calendar — an exam room, procedure suite, consult office, or imaging bay. Rooms can exist with or without imaging; many practices use them purely for scheduling non-imaging visits.

In imaging workflows, rooms are often coupled with a modality — the CT, MR, ultrasound, or other machine tied to that space. Assigning a modality to a room links the physical equipment to the appointments scheduled there, so the calendar, worklist, and study routing all refer to the same resource.

Rooms are configured under Operations. Users with Can Manage Operations can create and maintain rooms; PACS connectivity is managed separately by users with Can Manage PACS. See Inviting Users for permission details.

Rooms Across Appointment Types

The same room — especially one tied to a modality — can appear in multiple appointment types. For example, one MR suite might support new-patient scans, follow-ups, and specialty protocols, each as its own appointment type on the calendar.

The scheduling engine is intelligent about shared resources. A room assigned across several appointment types will never be double-booked, even when those types have different durations. Conflicts are prevented across all appointment types, not just within a single calendar view — so your modality stays accurately reserved no matter how patients book.

See Appointment Types — Availability for how rooms attach to scheduling templates.

Enabling PACS for a Room

When a room includes imaging, you can enable PACS for that room to connect a PACS node — the bridge between your modality and Avara’s study archive.

Two options are available:

• Cloud PACS — Available for connecting quickly during setup and recommended for testing purposes only. Useful for validating workflows before go-live.
• On-prem PACS server — Strongly recommended for clinical deployment. An Avara-managed on-prem server at your site is a secure routing node — it processes and encrypts DICOM so studies can be securely sent over the internet to Avara’s cloud archive, while staying integrated with Clinical Platform services.

For production imaging, on-prem PACS provides a secure, site-local path from your modalities to Avara’s study archive. Cloud PACS remains a convenient path for trials and integration checks.

How PACS Integration Works

Connecting a PACS node — cloud or on-prem — is what allows the modality at that room to participate in your full imaging workflow:

1. Worklist — The modality pulls the worklist for its scheduled appointments from Avara, so technologists see the correct patients and study details at the scanner without manual re-entry.
2. DICOM send — After acquisition, the modality sends DICOM data back to the Avara PACS so studies are stored, indexed, and available in the platform.
3. Study access — Once ingested, studies can be served to radiologists, referring providers, patients, and any other authorized user in your organization — for reading, reporting, sharing, and portal delivery according to your workflow rules.

This end-to-end path — schedule → worklist → capture → archive → read — is what links your calendar to your imaging floor. Appointment types with DICOM imaging enabled define which visits generate worklist entries and how reports and notifications are routed after studies arrive.

Setup and Support

Avara is built to make PACS setup straightforward. Our team assists at every step — networking, node configuration, modality worklist and send settings, and go-live validation — so you get a seamless, robust integration without navigating it alone.

Whether you are standing up your first scanner or expanding an existing imaging network, we work with your IT staff and modality vendors to get rooms and PACS connected correctly.

Pricing and Commitment

There are no PACS setup fees, no long-term contracts, no commitments, and no minimum spending required to use Avara PACS.

We serve organizations of every size and specialty:

• Hospitals and health systems
• Radiology groups
• High-volume imaging centers
• Boutique and specialty imaging centers
• Specialist providers with in-office imaging

Avara handles any volume of imaging — from one study per month to tens of thousands of studies per month — with the same platform and support model. Scale up or down as your practice grows; you are not locked into tiered minimums or enterprise-only terms.