May 14, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
Michael Green, D.O., has been helping to lead his radiologist colleagues forward towards automation-facilitated efficiency enhancement. Ultimately, he and his fellow radiologists in the Liberty Division of the Alliance Radiology group in the Kansas City metro area found a cloud-based PACS solution to be the inevitable choice when it came to access-anywhere imaging informatics.
May 1, 2012 Joe Marion
blog
A framework can build consensus and avoid misunderstandings when implementing a VNA. The framework graphs organizational focus against functional purpose, in an attempt to differentiate the particular needs, and potential emphasis of various vendors. Organizationally, initiatives can be focused around the needs of a single service area such as radiology, and primarily driven by the clinical service area.
April 19, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
More hospitals are looking to the cloud as a viable way to store clinical, imaging, and financial data. Experts acknowledge its advantages, but caution it’s a step that requires careful planning and vetting of potential cloud vendors.
April 12, 2012 Charlene Marietti
blog
Until now, the only absolute diagnosis of Alzheimer’s was by autopsy. As Sperling describes, neural markers can identify the difference between normal aging and Alzheimer’s and PET Amyloid Imaging can detect beta-amyloid neuritic plaques, a distinctive pathological feature of Alzheimer’s patients, in the living brain.
March 31, 2012
blog
This past weekend was the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting held in Chicago March 24-27. This year was an exciting year as there were major product announcements, but disappointing in that cardiology still appears to lag in terms of integrated cardiovascular information systems that will be essential to addressing ARRA/MU and the changing healthcare environment!
March 19, 2012
blog
Several recent enterprise imaging engagements have encompassed Pathology as an opportunity for digital image management, and they have afforded me the opportunity to gain a better appreciation for the state of the Digital Pathology market. From this experience, I am reminded of the similar experience in the early days of Radiology when the transition was made from film to digital images. The question is how similar will Pathology be, and can we learn from Radiology’s experience?
March 14, 2012
blog
I am currently engaged with a number of clients in various stages of the acquisition of some form of enterprise image management application. In some recent conversations with several vendors, I am surprised at the number of “Request for Proposals” or RFP’s that these vendors are receiving from various facilities. As a result, I am rethinking the acceptance rate of healthcare providers for addressing image management in the enterprise!
March 5, 2012 Gabriel Perna
article
The various imaging informatics problems in healthcare have been well documented. There is a higher volume of images coming in, less radiologists to receive them, numerous picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) in the market and a dearth of interoperability when it comes to moving through different systems. Furthermore, thanks to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), hospitals are less willing to commingle their data with radiology groups.
February 28, 2012 Gabriel Perna
article
To understand where the imaging informatics industry is headed, it’s important to recognize the evolution of image-archiving systems. As Keith Dreyer, M.D., vice chairman of radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Mass. and assistant professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School, puts it, those solutions first emerged as “monolithic” systems for the radiology department. In the next phase of their evolution, they were used and adapted for cardiology departments. For a period of time, the imaging needs in hospitals didn’t often go beyond those two departments.
February 27, 2012
blog
In a continuing series looking at the so-called Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA), this installment addresses the role a VNA can be expected to play in future PACS. There are some who believe the VNA will become the core of all future PACS, replacing legacy PACS altogether. I am not one of them!
February 23, 2012 Gabriel Perna
article
In this podcast, Assistant Editor Gabe Perna talks with Dr. Rasu Shrestha, M.D., vice president of Medical Information Technology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) live from the HIMSS12 conference in Las Vegas. Dr. Shrestha is also the medical director of Interoperability and Imaging informatics and the chief of the radiology informatics division at UPMC and has a wealth of knowledge on the issues facing providers when it comes to creating an enterprise wide image repository.
February 6, 2012
blog
Understanding VNA objectives aids in knowing how to apply industry standards
.jpg)
