Case Studies

A little more than a year ago, I left my full partnership position at a successful radiology practice for a teleradiology job with vRad, a MEDNAX company. I was a bit nervous making such a life-changing decision, but I knew I needed a change. Partnership had been a life goal since med school, but now I had different priorities. I had kids, new interests. Making the move allowed me to focus more on me and my family while still doing the work that I love.

If a mad scientist were to meld the mind of a passionate teaching radiologist with that of an especially acquisitive museum curator, the result would surely be someone very much like Benjamin W. Strong, MD.

When Merritt Hawkins published its 2018 Review of Physician and Advanced Practitioner Recruiting Incentives, it contained some exciting news for radiologists: after a rough few years earlier this decade, the radiology job market has climbed back with a vengeance.

When UC San Diego Health introduced its expanded Comprehensive Breast Health Center this spring, Haydee Ojeda-Fournier, MD, medical director of breast imaging, got right to the point for the press covering the development. She emphasized that the informal reopening had doubled the capacity of an existing program and that the center now houses an integrated suite of numerous advanced-imaging technologies all under one roof.

With PACS as with any healthcare-specific technology, some universal expectations are common to all end-users and their IT support teams. Yet there are also as many unique sets of preferences as there are PACS stakeholders.

The past several years have seen the development of a de facto stealth campaign against screening mammography. “Vast Study Casts Doubts on Value of Mammograms,” the New York Times bullhorned in 2014. “Why Getting a Mammogram May Cause More Trouble Than It’s Worth,” a Prevention headline blared in 2016. “It’s Time to End Mammograms, Some Experts Say,” trumpeted Time this past December. All of this is fueled, of course, by the never-ending disputes over guidelines issued by numerous authoritative groups.

In a California emergency room, a trauma patient in critical condition is wheeled in following a motorcycle accident. In Texas, a patient presenting with stroke-like symptoms is brought into the hospital by frantic family members.

To meet the latest guidelines on promptness from the American Heart Association (AHA) and American Stroke Association (ASA), providers must image suspected stroke patients within 20 minutes of their arrival. For a brain deprived of oxygen by a blood clot, every second counts.

Medical historians may one day look back on 2018 as the year having a stroke stopped bringing an inescapably bleak prognosis to victims who went a while before noticing the symptoms.

West Feliciana Hospital (WFH) has been serving patients in the small town of St. Francisville, Louisiana, since 1970, but its imaging capabilities were limited for a long time. As a result, the hospital gained a bit of a reputation among referring physicians in the area—when in doubt, they would just avoid WFH altogether and send patients more than 30 miles away to Baton Rouge.

The Miami Cancer Institute (MCI) started nearly 10 years ago as a collection of widely distributed service lines without an identifiable physical presence. The idea was to bring together local and regional cancer experts from every medical discipline and every support service. The vision was mass collaboration around providing world-class cancer care to patients from across the Southeastern U.S. as well as Latin America and the Caribbean.

Natural language processing (NLP)—the concept of training computer programs to extract specific content from words and phrases—has existed in one form or another since the 1950s, but its potential to impact radiology has only been brought into focus in recent years. Vendors all over the world, including vRad, a MEDNAX company, are working around the clock to see just how much NLP can do to revolutionize healthcare—and they are finding that it can do quite a lot.