Cardiology and radiology: Are they two specialties working in tandem for optimal patient care or two opposing armies in a turf battle? The answer, of course, is complicated, and can’t be approached without an acknowledgement of the ground already ceded to cardiology.

In 2005, Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) published the Cross-enterprise Document Sharing for Imaging (XDS-I) integration profile, extending the capabilities of XDS by incorporating DICOM instances and providing a blueprint for image exchange among disparate institutions. Nonetheless, the will remained weak through the latter half of the

However daunting the concept might appear, migration to image sharing via Web portal or the cloud is seemingly well worth the effort, given the disadvantages of other options, such as paper printouts, film, and CDs. David S. Mendelson, MD, is chief of clinical informatics and director of radiology information systems at the Mount Sinai Medical

Image sharing yields an impressive host of benefits. Patient care improves with timely physician access to images, and there are much-needed efficiency gains when examinations repeated due to the inability to access prior images are eliminated. While specifications for image exchange have surfaced in the past decade, few projects have advanced

When, today, you go to see suites of hospitals and systems, they have got a grand strategy for what they want to execute in the next 10 years. It’s not an exaggeration to say the whole thing depends on IT. Without IT, it’s not going to change. How different from past reform attempts this will be is due to the power and capability of IT,” James

In a promising sign of economic recovery, hospital-based radiology decision makers intend to spend 10% more overall on medical-imaging technology this year, according to a new report from KLAS (Orem, Utah). According to Diagnostic Imaging Purchases 2010: Spending Increases, Loyalty Is Tested, providers plan to meet or increase purchases in all

It is no easy task to hit a moving target, so the seven speakers who presented the refresher course, “How Payment Policy Will Impact Technology Development in the 21st Century,” on November 30, 2010, at the annual meeting of the RSNA in Chicago, Illinois, diligently colored in the background of the canvas, offering insight into the anatomy of a CPT

The lack of consensus (and vision) in the imaging community is readily apparent when the topic of clinical decision support is raised. Clinical decision support allows for electronic documentation of the appropriateness of the imaging service ordered and provided, offering clinicians real-time guidance, rather than black-box rules.