September 18, 2012 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
To pursue an enterprise imaging strategy, the 40-hospital Dignity Health system (formerly Catholic Healthcare West) seeks interoperability before consolidation. The San Francisco, Calif.-based health system is in the midst of connecting all 30 of its imaging care centers to its enterprise archive before paring down its five picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) providers to one.
September 14, 2012
news
According to new research from the Mountain View, Calif.-based research firm, Frost & Sullivan, the radiology picture archiving and communication systems (PACSs) industry will see slow growth over the coming years. The report’s authors say the market earned revenues of $1.1 billion in 2011 and estimate it will reach $1.4 billion in 2018.
September 7, 2012 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
blog
For a larger feature on enterprise imaging that I’ve been working on, I touched base with Todd Rogow, director of information technology at HealthInfoNet, Maine’s statewide health information exchange, to see how the statewide image repository that jumpstarted in May was shaping up. And from the interest of other states being shown in this model, it appears to be going quite well.
August 29, 2012 Joe Marion
blog
I have been reading several posts attempting to interpret the impact of the final ruling for ARRA/MU Stage 2, and the absence of imaging. As best I can conclude, the “image” of imaging is one of total confusion!
August 28, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
At the “Merge Live” client conference in downtown Chicago, well-known imaging informatics expert Eliot Siegel, M.D., offers his perspectives on the future of imaging informatics, and the large gap between EHR reality and medical specialist usability
August 22, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
Randy Hicks, M.D. and his colleagues at Regional Medical Imaging in Flint, Michigan, are moving ahead to continue to enhance the core IT infrastructure for their imaging center operations. Dr. Hicks sees the future in an interconnected, and very strategic, way.
August 16, 2012 Joe Marion
blog
Consumer electronics can impact healthcare applications. Will the outcome of the Apple-Samsung trial impact healthcare IT innovation?
August 6, 2012 Joe Marion
blog
I recently read an article in Advance for Imaging & Radiation Oncology, July/Aug 2012 by Shannon Werb, Chief Strategy Officer/COO for Acuo Technologies, entitled “The case for VNA.” Shannon makes the case for differentiating between a PACS vendor VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive) and a VNA offered by a truly independent vendor. The differentiation is made on how interoperable the VNA is in terms of working with all vendor solutions (i.e. “Vendor Neutral”), noting that some so-called VNA’s may merely be an extension of the PACS vendor’s PACS archive.
July 25, 2012
news
According to a new study in Health Affairs, there has been a decline in the demand for imaging studies, which has led to a decrease in the demand for new radiologists. The study, which was conducted by a pair of health economics researchers, also found that growth in the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) for patients in the United States slowed to between one-to-three percent per year between 2006 and 2009. This came after a decade of growth that exceeded six percent annually.
July 13, 2012
news
Most healthcare providers are in the early stages of forming an enterprise imaging strategy, which will enable getting the right image to the right place at the right time, according to a new KLAS (Orem, Utah) study, Enterprise Imaging 2012: Provider's Strategies and Insights. Although providers feel that no single vendor can deliver all of the pieces needed for their enterprise imaging strategy, most are considering one of two main approaches: a vendor-neutral archive (VNA) centric approach or a PACS enterprise archive solution.
July 11, 2012
news
The Reston, Va. –based American College of Radiology's (ACR) national standard for imaging protocols—ACR Appropriateness Criteria (AC) —is now available in a digitally consumable format to be incorporated into computerized ordering and electronic health record (EHR) systems. ACR has entered into an exclusive agency agreement with the National Decision Support Company (NDSC) to provide the technical platform, support and licensing of the AC under the name ACR Select.
July 8, 2012 Joe Marion
blog
Some EMR vendors choose not to play in the data capture space, and expect documentation to be done manually within the EMR at the expense of similar information automatically acquired by data capture devices. Case in point–consider hemodynamic systems which have classically been the primary point for documentation of cardiac and vascular procedures.
