Disaster recovery is an event that PACS administrators hope that they never will have to confront, but it is increasingly clear that it needs to be a top-of-mind concern. Natural disasters, particularly tornadoes and floods, seem to be occurring more frequently, with greater intensity and with more resulting damage. Hospitals and imaging centers are not exempt from their effects.

With more than 800 active health IT applications to maintain, Bill Russell has no time for distractions. The senior vice president and CIO of St Joseph Health—a nonprofit integrated health-care network that includes 14 hospitals in California and Texas—has a lot on his plate.

After four days of ravaging Jamaica, Cuba, and the Bahamas, Hurricane Sandy slammed into the New Jersey shoreline on October 29, 2012, resulting in losses of $30 billion to businesses in the affected area; damaging or destroying 346,000 homes; causing widespread power outages (some of which lasted for several weeks); and killing 37 people. Neither the popular seaside city of Cape May nor Cape Regional Medical Center (CRMC), a 240-bed community hospital in Cape May Court House, suffered damage from what turned out to be the deadliest, most destructive hurricane of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season—and the second-costliest storm of its type in U.S. history.

As radiology enters the era of quantitative imaging, it is well advised to carry with it an old friend, the DICOM standard, according to David A. Clunie, PhD, CTO of CoreLab Partners. He lays out his case in “(Informatics) Standards for Quantitative Imaging,” which he presented on November 28, 2012, at the annual meeting of the RSNA in Chicago, Illinois.

For a cardiologist, Wm. Guy Weigold, MD, spends an unusual amount of time in front of a monitor. “I happen to be a cardiologist who has expertise in cardiac CT,” he explains. “I spend the majority of my time looking at images.” Weigold is director of the cardiac CT program at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, DC, and he directs

When Rex Healthcare (Raleigh, North Carolina) went shopping for a cardiology image-management solution, it was looking for three things: good vendor support, the ability for cardiologists to access prior studies from the radiology PACS, and a willing development partner to grow with as it built an employed cardiology practice and a new heart

If imaging is to visualize its future accurately, it must do so by looking to business models outside the health-care arena, according to Dieter Enzmann, MD, chief of the department of radiology at the University of California–Los Angeles. “There are three generic models that exist in virtually every mature market,” he says. “There’s always a low

Kenneth Schwartz, MD, medical director of New York Radiology Alliance (NYRA) in Bedford Hills, describes today’s radiology-practice environment as characterized by catch-22s. “I’ve been in the business for many years, and I have never seen such a drastic change over such a short period,” he says. “The demands of customers, referring physicians, and