Preliminary numbers released by the Radiological Society of North America show that attendance was similar to last year's numbers

The recent upheavals in the world of health care have meant the arrival of new challenges with each passing year, and owing to imaging’s contributions to escalating costs, radiology has been especially hard hit in the past. 2014 will prove to be no exception, bringing a fresh slate of reimbursement and market challenges, according to Jeff Maze, director of business intelligence for Zotec Partners. “Understanding these issues, as well as their potential impact on the business of radiology, will be mission critical,” he says.

Our company is fortunate to have the opportunity to work with a large number of single and multisite imaging centers each year. This affords us the opportunity to observe and benchmark the financial and operating trends of a statistically significant sample size of imaging centers across the nation.

Patient-centered health care has been a buzzword for some time, but the middle ground where patients and their providers meet is always shifting, according to the presenters of a December 3 session at the 2013 annual meeting of the RSNA in Chicago, Illinois. Susan John, MD; Elliot Fishman, MD; and Brent Wagner, MD, presented “Patient-Centered Radiology” to explore how engagement with patients is changing. As Wagner puts it, “All the things we might do to make our practices more patient-centric are a balancing act between opportunities and challenges.”

I attended my first annual meeting of the RSNA in 2006. I was, to put it mildly, unprepared. I remember being first astonished and then exhausted by its scale. I also remember carrying a cell phone—not a smartphone (and not even a phone with a camera), but just a regular old flip phone, good for nothing but talking and texting. On the exhibition floor, 64-slice CT was big news. PACS developers told me that they had a hard time getting some radiologists to use email, much less their new Web-based tools.

It’s a question on the minds of many in the imaging community: How can a specialty with very little patient interaction built into its workflow improve its service to patients? As an emerging practice model, patient-centered radiology has a nice ring to it, but as Greg Thomson, CPA, executive vice president with Zotec Partners, notes, “This represents a major cultural leap for radiology. Radiologists have long had multiple customers—including referring physicians and hospitals—along with patients, and because they often do not interact with patients, their focus has been on the referring physicians, not the patients. It is a mindset shift for the specialty.”

Like most radiology practices nationwide, Pueblo Radiology Medical Group, based in Santa Barbara, California, is facing the imperative to do business differently than in the past. Wayne Baldwin, CEO of the 18-radiologist practice, attributes the shift to changes in the regulatory environment that have made today’s radiology marketplace anything but “business as usual.”

Many radiology practices, by now, have been persuaded of the importance of deeper alignment and integration with their hospitals and health systems. Jana Landreth, director of practice management for Zotec Partners, says, “If your hospital approaches you wanting this, you need to embrace it. Going into this with reluctance or hesitation will not move your relationship forward, and the odds are that you will wind up doing it eventually anyway. If you embrace it now, you will be able to set the goals with the hospital and make them realistic for what your practice can achieve.”