On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina—the deadliest storm of its kind in U.S. history—made its final landfall near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi with a 28-foot storm surge and a storm tide of more than 30 feet deep. Like 80 percent of New Orleans, many neighboring parishes, and a multitude of other coastal towns along the Gulf of Mexico, Bay St. Louis was devastated by the hurricane.

If the ONC’s draft interoperability roadmap is to guide American healthcare to the intended destination — the promised land of better, less expensive care through information technology — it will need to galvanize “unprecedented collaboration” among all stakeholders. 

If Kevin McEnery, MD, has one message for radiology, it is this: To improve service within the radiology department, you must have access to data from outside the radiology department.

The news this week that Thomas Eric Duncan succumbed to the Ebola virus while being treated at Texas Health Presbyterian was a stark reminder of the ephemeral quality of life, the everyday courage of hospital-based healthcare providers and the importance of communications in that endeavor.

Denver, Colorado and Montreal, Canada – October 8, 2014 – Intelerad Medical Systems™, a leader in medical imaging PACS, RIS and workflow solutions, today announced the launch of their Assignment Engine module, which automatically assigns pending cases from across the enterprise to the most suitable radiologist, and prioritizes the cases within the radiologist's own dynamic worklist.

Workflow. Efficiency. The terms are bounced around every day in healthcare. But when it comes to the productivity and profitability of your radiologists and the department as a whole, the right PACS makes all the difference. Getting comfortable with a system can literally cost you hundreds of thousands, if not more.

As diagnostic imaging becomes even more complex, so, too, does the business of running a hospital. Margins are low, competition is high and hospitals are consolidating just to survive. Next-generation imaging solutions are emerging to take the industry to the next level. Industry visionaries have coined the term PACS 3.0 to describe the system of the future with patient-centric data and the fulfillment of anytime, anywhere access. But these visionaries have put the industry on notice that PACS 3.0 simply can’t be achieved without the ability to scale and interoperate with other systems. The burning question in the industry should be: how do we get from here to there?

As radiology struggles to find its footing in an emerging healthcare delivery paradigm that emphasizes collaboration and accountability, radiologist Rasu Shrestha, MD, finds himself at the center of the fray at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Penn., where he was recently named chief innovation officer and president, Technology Development Center.