Patient engagement in health care (or patient-centered communication, as it’s often called) has been compared to marriage, where the relationship between care seeker and caregiver is based on trust, respect, openness, and empowerment.

A decade after starting Diagnostic Professionals, Inc (DPI), Claude Hanuschak, its COO, still refuses to let federal payment policy thwart his success. When faced with a 35% reimbursement reduction due to implementation of the DRA, the 30-year radiology veteran and president/COO of the four-site Florida imaging-center chain responded with a resolve to become more efficient, largely through a reliance on appropriate technology.

If the triple aim—improved access to better-quality health care at a lower cost—is the goal of health-care reform, then patient-centered care is its soul. Throughout the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the authors took precautions to protect patients from the abuses of 1990s-era managed care, when profits appeared to trump patient care.

When Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath devastated New York, New York, in October 2012, perhaps no one was more vulnerable than the patients needing care in area hospitals. Eli Tarlow, CIO of the city’s Bellevue Hospital Center (BHC), recalls, “It was the best of times and worst of times—a natural event that no one could have prevented. You really see the best of your staff in moments of crisis, and that held true during Hurricane Sandy. Staff members at all levels volunteered to do anything necessary, from bringing needed supplies up and down many flights of stairs to helping with preparing or delivering food for patients. Nothing came between the employees and the work that needed to be done to maintain patient care.”

Managing emergency-department volume is a perennial challenge for hospitals, and at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center (SMRMC) in Reno, Nevada, emergency-department volume is only expected to grow, according to Helen Lidholm, CEO. “We’re assessing what our emergency-department volume is going to look like, based on what we know about our community and how our local patient population will be affected by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” she says. “Every community is different, but we’re anticipating higher volume in the emergency department.”

In February 2013, the ACR® Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute (HPI) released a brief¹ proposing a classification system for repeat medical-imaging studies. Richard Duszak, MD, CEO of HPI, says, “We wanted to propose a way to study the incidence, utilization, and appropriateness of repeat imaging for research and policy purposes. While that was our primary audience, and they would be researching this retrospectively, there is a lot of opportunity to do this in a prospective, real-time fashion for quality-improvement purposes.”

Mercy San Juan Medical Center is a 370-bed acute-care hospital in Carmichael, California, that is part of the not-for-profit Dignity Health System. It has experienced significant growth since it opened its doors in 1967—particularly following the 2009 introduction of a new patient tower that added 110 beds.

The Argonauts (and Odysseus, after them) had to sail past rocky islands housing the enchanting Sirens. Their wonderful songs made sailors hurl themselves overboard and swim toward them, even as they died upon the jagged rocks. After my fifth birthday, however, I accepted that plugging my ears never makes bad news go away for long.