February 15, 2013 John DeGaspari
article
New technology innovations have clearly captured the imaginations of clinicians and patients alike, and provider organizations will see big demands on bandwidth, which will put pressure on provider organizations to upgrade their IT infrastructure. At the same time, hospitals, medical groups, and health systems will need to continue to maintain data security and privacy. The upshot is that patient care organizations can’t afford not to make investments in infrastructure—often a tough sell to the hospital boards that control budgets—just to stay one step ahead of new demands.
December 11, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
As Rebecca Grant, director of imaging services at the 625-bed Huntington Hospital, and her colleagues moved through the process of selecting a new PACS vendor, interoperability was the most important factor in their decision-making. Grant explains the various elements in a complex informatics imaging environment, and the factors that influenced her and her colleagues' important decision in this critical area.
November 29, 2012 Mark Hagland
blog
As RSNA 2012 wound toward its close at Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center, the atmosphere this year seemed to be one of nervous anticipation, with many attendees looking for signs and signals of all kinds. For many in radiology and imaging informatics, the challenges seemed daunting. But could new technologies, intelligently implemented, be a part of a broader solution?
November 28, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
If any consultant could claim the mantle of “sage of imaging informatics,” it might well be Joe Marion, who has attended and participated in more than 30 RSNA annual conferences. Joe sat down on the Wednesday of RSNA with HCI Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland to share his perspectives on both this year's conference and on the current evolution of imaging informatics more broadly.
November 26, 2012 Mark Hagland
blog
Meeting this morning during RSNA 2012 with executives from the Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare, one thing was clear: those patient care organizations with an imaging informatics strategy—perhaps almost any imaging informatics strategy??—are already light years ahead of their peer organizations whose senior executives have no such strategy.
October 29, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
Leaders at Northeast Georgia Health System have achieved health information exchange for images, while at the same time achieving Stage 1 meaningful use, and pursuing a broad clinical IT strategy, using state-of-the-art information technology.
October 1, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
Disasters can strike at any time, and there is really no way provider organizations can completely insulate themselves from unforeseen or large-scale natural events such as hurricanes, floods, and fires. Nonetheless, as hospitals continue on their steady march to becoming paperless organizations, many are following strategies that are minimizing their risk of unplanned downtime. Three hospital systems provide details about how technology has influenced the way they prepare for disasters and what they have learned from their experiences.
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 23, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
CommuniCare Health Services, a regional provider of long-term care services that is based in Cincinnati, Ohio, needed a better approach to manage its data storage and backup. The organization, which owns and operates more than 40 nursing and rehabilitation facilities, specialty care centers, assisted living centers and retirement centers, and advanced specialty hospitals in four states, roughly doubled its size over the past four years through acquisitions. That rapid growth was matched by a corresponding demand for IT services. How did the organization evaluate its present and future data storage needs?
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.
March 28, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
Healthcare data security spending is growing rapidly, and is expected to reach $40 billion in 2012—a 22-percent increase from 2011. The higher cost of maintaining data centers has led healthcare organizations to consider lower cost cities in which to locate these operations, according to a recently released report by The Boyd Company, Inc., Princeton, N.J. The study estimates that data security spending will top $70 billion by 2015.
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.
