gets because there's less space between the pixels, so if you have a
wall-mounted 55-inch 4K monitor, the images will appear much sharp-
er than they would if the signal and monitor were HD.
• Surgeon input. Some of your surgeons may be championing a 4K
upgrade, which is good, because as an administrator you're going to
need their help to push this over the goal line. But also consider this:
Many surgeons don't like to introduce changes to their routines if they
can avoid it. They might be totally happy with their HD systems and
see no reason to upgrade. Ask your surgeons how they feel about 4K
— especially your big hitters.
• Recruiting. If you're looking to recruit top surgeons, 4K will be a
big draw. Your facility will also be more attractive to young surgeons
who trained on 4K as students.
• Upgrade all of your ORs — not some. It might be tempting to dip
your toe by upgrading 1 or 2 ORs to 4K and leaving the rest with HD.
The problem with that is once surgeons see the 4K or hear raves
about it from other surgeons, they're probably going to want it, too.
That could lead to more demand for the 4K ORs and underutilization
of the HD ORs. For this upgrade to work best, it should be all or noth-
ing, but budgets do play a role. That also goes for individual 4K sys-
tems — buy all of the components of the system, not just the camera,
not just the monitor. It makes little sense to do this piecemeal,
because if the entire image processing chain isn't 4K, you're not see-
ing 4K.
• Servers and storage. Your surgeons will generate a lot of 4K
video and images. How will you collect, store, manage and share
these files? Some camera vendors offer their own servers, while some
offer connections to your existing PACS system. How long will you
need to store images and video? Some systems are "first in, first out,"
meaning that when the server fills up, it starts to delete the oldest
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