Case Studies

It was only recently that 10 radiology practices from around the United States formed a new managed services organization (MSO), named it Unified Radiology and took aim at securing independence for each member practice. Almost immediately, members discovered that the modest investment of time creating the MSO would result in significant financial returns, now and in the future.

One of the biggest ongoing trends in healthcare in recent years has been the increased focus on educating women about breast density. Dense breast tissue can obscure small masses and lower the sensitivity of mammograms, making it especially vital that women know their options if mammography reveals they have dense breasts.

Medical imaging is in a big battle with big data. There’s too much data in too many locations, and most often they are not well managed. Data are clearly imaging’s most abundant yet most underutilized strategic asset. 

If you’ve seen one data center, you’ve seen them all. That’s what Charles Rivers believed, at least.

Like every American academic healthcare institution, SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., is a beehive of activity in three overlapping yet distinct areas of focus—patient care, physician education and medical research. 

Bill Lacy, vice president of medical informatics at FUJIFILM Medical Systems U.S.A., spoke with Radiology Business about AI’s impact on radiologist workflow and what the company has planned for HIMSS19.

A family from Pennsylvania’s Plain People community, which consists primarily of Amish and Mennonite families, recently took their child to Cardiology Care for Children (CCC), a small yet regionally renowned practice in Lancaster.

Last spring RBJ put out a call for entrants to compete in its inaugural Imaging Innovation Awards. We opened the contest to all private radiology practices and hospital radiology departments that had recently completed a project combining creative thinking with coordinated teamwork to develop a notably original breakthrough in some particular aspect of medical imaging.

The Southeast Regional Stroke Center at Erlanger, based out of the University of Tennessee’s Erlanger Medical Center in Chattanooga, receives referrals from more than 40 hospitals and treats more than 2,500 strokes each year. Patients are rushed to their internationally-recognized center, more commonly referred to as the Erlanger Stroke Network, both day and night, some arriving by ambulance and others by helicopter.

It’s just complicated. That’s the view many radiology practice leaders have of managing their information technology. But bringing together the right systems, software, infrastructure, and team can conquer that—even for large, complex practices like Central Illinois Radiological Associates (CIRA). Interpreting more than one million studies per year, and serving more than 26 hospitals, cancer centers, and clinics across multiple hospital systems utilizing multiple IT solutions, the secret sauce is a single worklist that helps unify study management across all sites.

I love being a neuroradiologist and helping patients. I’ve always loved it. But there are downsides to the work as well. The stress levels might be high, you can feel isolated or restricted and your work list may control everything you do—it’s no wonder burnout is so high in our profession these days.

As far back as my undergraduate years, I knew I wanted to work in a field that combined medicine with computer science. I actually had a professor who told me that was a silly combination. He said there’d never be a real-world need for it. How wrong he was—and how fortunate I am to now work for a radiology practice whose hallmark is its enthusiastic embrace of IT and imaging informatics.