Executing the Digital Transformation

May 17, 2010 | Radinformatics

When Saint Michael’s Medical Center (SMMC), Newark, New Jersey, was acquired by Catholic Health East in 2009, the organization had some catching up to do in the IT department: With no PACS or electronic medical record (EMR), its... Read More »

Crystal Ball: Toward True Enterprise Image Management

April 12, 2010 | Radinformatics

As the potential role of informatics in transforming health care gains national attention, how are IT tools for imaging and image management evolving to improve clinical efficiency and bolster quality of care? ImagingBiz spoke with Aaron Waitz, vice president of product development for FUJIFILM Medical Systems USA, Stamford, Connecticut,... Read More »

Improving Health Care: There Are Apps for That

April 07, 2010 | Heavy Traffic

If Dan Hesse had told you, 25 years ago, that you’d be reviewing studies, monitoring patients, and communicating with referrers using Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone, you would have thought him delirious. With today’s smart phones in play, the pitch from Sprint’s CEO did not sound like... Read More »

Academic PACS: It’s Not Elementary, Watson

April 07, 2010 | Planning Portal

In the late 1990s, Yale School of Medicine, New haven, Connecticut, implemented its first PACS. James Brink, MD, chair of the department of radiology and professor of diagnostic radiology, recalls how radiologists initially adapted to the brave new digital world: “It took some of the more senior radiologists a... Read More »

UPMC’s Rasu Shrestha, MD, MBA:  Improving the Value Proposition of Imaging Informatics

April 07, 2010 | Enterprise Trooper

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), with 20 affiliated hospitals and 30 imaging centers in western Pennsylvania, could be seen as ground zero in the effort to digitize medicine. From its innovative financial and development partnership with IBM to a recently announced pact with Google to develop a personal electronic... Read More »

Enterprise Image Management: Bringing Cardiology Into the Fold

March 16, 2010 | Radinformatics

Harris County Hospital District (HCHD) is the public health-care system for the nation’s third most populous county (Harris County, Texas); with 44 locations, it generates 420,000 radiology procedures and 70,000 cardiology procedures each year. When HCHD made the decision to expand its electronic medical record (EMR) to include PACS and other... Read More »

High Hurdles for HITECH Dollars

February 25, 2010 | Health IT Policy

The indefinite path to qualifying for Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act funds just came into greater focus, but it’s not to everyone’s liking. At the end of December 2009, HHS released two notices of proposed rule making that specify, in numbing detail, the definitions... Read More »

Building the Fully Loaded HIE: Images on Board

February 25, 2010 | Feature

With a health IT stimulus package valued at $19 billion1 in play, one of the least controversial subjects in the health-reform debate is the potential of health information exchanges (HIEs) to lower health care costs while improving efficiency and quality of care. A handful of players in health IT have... Read More »

Interoperability: An Open-source Toolkit

February 24, 2010 | Feature

Within radiology, interoperability and sharing information are among our most challenging and important tasks. Not only does the coming wave of adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) technology mean that we need to be able to exchange electronic information with other providers and health-care software systems, but even within... Read More »

The CIO Perspective: Issues in Image Management

February 24, 2010 | Feature

It is taxing enough for radiology and IT decision makers to contend with the image-management consequences of multidetector CT, high–field-strength MRI, 3D reconstructions, and various recent other trends responsible for a rising tide of diagnostic data. Added to this are the burdens created by other disciplines across the... Read More »

Leveraging IT for Better Service

February 15, 2010 | Radinformatics

Don Trexler, CEO of Baton Rouge Radiology Group (BRRG) in Louisiana, wants his practice to be different from a typical imaging group. “We’re a full-service radiology firm,” he says. “The radiology market, in general, is becoming more and more price conscious. To be in a leadership position when... Read More »

Marooned on Level 3: Leverage IT to Improve Reporting

January 10, 2010 | Destination Digital

In a December 2 session at RSNA 2009 in Chicago, Illinois, on using next-generation health care IT to improve radiology, David Avrin, MD, PhD, radiologist at the University of California–San Francisco Medical Center, opened with a comment made to him by one of his hospital administrators: “Images these days are... Read More »

Federated-model HIE Connects 16 Unaffiliated Hospitals

January 10, 2010 | Enterprise Trooper

When the 16 hospitals of the Western North Carolina Health Network (WNCHN) sat down to create a federated model for a health information exchange (HIE) four years ago, they could find no examples of unaffiliated institutions sharing health data, so WNCHN essentially began with a tabula rasa.

“At... Read More »

Catching Up With the Future: The Radiology of Tomorrow

December 22, 2009 | Enterprise View

The future is here—it just hasn’t made it to radiology yet. A restless pioneer spirit continues to drive radiology into the future, even if that future is lagging well behind advances achieved by Internet commerce companies. “This is not novel; this is how IT works in every... Read More »

Toward True Globalization: The Air Force and PACS

December 22, 2009 | Radinformatics

Sharing images across any health care enterprise represents a challenge, but doing so across the Pacific Rim was the dilemma faced in 2003 by the US Air Force. Taking up this challenge were Lt Col Grant Tibbetts, MD, now radiology consultant to the surgeon general, and Tom Lewis, the director... Read More »

Extending Advanced Visualization Across Multiple Departments

November 19, 2009 | Enterprise View

Among the virtues of thin-client 3D advanced visualization are ease and economy of deployment across an enterprise. Above both, however, lies the ability to improve the quality of care. At Beebe Medical Center in Lewes, Delaware, which has extended access to its advanced visualization platform from the radiology department... Read More »

Software Allows Virtual PET/MRI Fusion

November 19, 2009 | Revenue Track

It was a difficult, but not uncommon, neuroradiology case: A patient suffered seizures, but had, a year before, been cleared of the possibility of epilepsy by a radiologist looking at an MRI study of the patient’s brain. The persistence of the symptoms suggested that the initial diagnosis had... Read More »

The Transformational Effects of Informatics on the Practice of Radiology: A Roundtable Discussion

November 09, 2009 | Planning Portal

On October 6, 2009, four physicians gathered in Stamford, Connecticut, to participate in a discussion moderated by Cheryl Proval, Radinformatics.com editorial director.

State of the Technology: Geoffrey Rubin, MD, on 3D Visualization

October 14, 2009 | Enterprise View

As CT technology continues to advance and the number of slices in a given exam grows exponentially, how is the role of enterprise visualization software evolving to suit the needs of the modern radiology department? ImagingBiz.com speaks with Geoffrey Rubin, MD, professor of radiology and vice chief of... Read More »

At the Intersection of Radiology and the EHR

October 02, 2009 | Feature

The heightened interest in electronic medical records (EMRs) and electronic health records (EHRs) can be attributed, in part, to the recent announcement that federal funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) would be made available to qualified medical practices commencing in 2011. Though radiology continues to question its... Read More »

Enterprise Visualization: The CIO Story

September 11, 2009 | Enterprise View

When contemplating implementation of an enterprise-wide advanced visualization solution, expect to hear many concerns voiced by various stakeholders—and look for the CIO’s voice to be front and center among them. Topping the CIO’s list of concerns will most probably be whether (and to what extent) the... Read More »

RIS Migration at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center

August 18, 2009 | Radinformatics

It’s as extreme a transition as any IT professional could imagine: moving from a remotely hosted RIS to a fully integrated RIS/PACS over the course of just a few short months. Bill Cummins and his team, however, had ample motivation to make the switch. The director of... Read More »

View From the Podium: Stanford MDCT Face-Off

July 15, 2009 | Enterprise View

By stipulation, there were to be no winners when eight vendors of advanced imaging workstations and their physician teams competed in the Seventh Annual Original Workstation Face-off, held May 20 in San Francisco, California, at Stanford Radiology’s 11th Annual International Symposium on Multidetector-row CT. Even so, according to... Read More »

PACS Nirvana: University Radiology’s Reporting-driven Workflow

July 15, 2009 | Radinformatics

Ever since digital imaging liberated radiologists from the site of image acquisition, radiology practices have labored to patch together distributed reading solutions that would efficiently meet the needs of multiple clients, balance workflow, and enable subspecialization.

Not all solutions have been elegant, and many are downright ugly,... Read More »

Trends and Tactics for IT Spending

July 01, 2009 | Strategic Planning

The cost of health IT ownership is projected to be nearly twice what hospitals and independent health clinics spend on IT technology and software in 2009, according to Mike Davis, vice president, HIMSS Analytics™, Chicago, Illinois. He shared trends from a database that includes 32,000 health care providers in the United... Read More »