Medical Imaging Blog

Medical Imaging: Our Future

Attention Radiologists: Get Ready for ACOs by Taking the Lead

The very mention of “ACOs” can cause tremors through the medical imaging community, but it’s time for radiologists and other medical imaging professionals to prepare to transition to an ACO care model, said Ascendian Health Care Consulting’s Jef Williams and Shawn McKenzie at the recent AHRA annual meeting.

The Accountable Care Organization or ACO is the creation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) passed in 2010. It’s designed to improve patient care and bring down (or at least control the growth of) medical costs by bringing several types of medical organizations together to meet specific performance targets. Payment will move away from a fee-for-service-based model and toward an outcome-based model, leading physicians and other healthcare professionals to be less “siloed” and more coordinated with other healthcare workers in their efforts to care for patients.

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The Importance of Having a Medical Imaging Business Strategy

Developing a strategy for a medical imaging practice can be daunting, says Brian Baker, but it’s absolutely necessary for survival and growth in today’s medical marketplace.

Baker is the president of Regents Health Resources, a Tennessee-based medical imaging consulting firm. His comments on developing strategic plans were delivered at the recent AHRA in Dallas.

Baker likes to use the example of Intermountain Healthcare to demonstrate his points.

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Note to Medical Imaging Professionals: Play in the Sandbox Together

If cardiologists, radiologists, and other medical imaging professionals don’t play well in the sandbox together, the federal government will make them do so – or perhaps tear up the sandbox and build something of its own devising.

That’s the message of a recent issue of Health Imaging & IT. Ever-advancing technology may have been the bread and butter of medical imaging a decade ago, but now its cooperation.

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McKesson CVIS Revolutionizes a Hospital’s Medical Imaging

What can a CVIS do? “With Horizon Cardiology…I can instantly see everything I need from one reading station. As soon as I sign the report, it’s instantaneously in the electronic patient record,” says William Suarez, chief of pediatric cardiology and associate professor at Mercy Children’s Hospital in Toledo, Ohio. And for him, that was a huge change.

Before Mercy implemented the CVIS from McKesson, its pediatric cardiologists regularly dealt with damaged video cassettes, slow couriers, and difficulty comparing multi-modality images. The last problem was especially troublesome, for it made it difficult to compare images of children as they grew.

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McKesson CVIS and NCDR Solutions

A recent article in Cath Lab Digest highlights the importance of having a good CVIS.

The National Cardiovascular Data Registry® (NCDR), run by the American College of Cardiology (ACC) in cooperation with other cardiovascular associations, is one of the many excellent medical tools made possible by advances in information technology. Participating hospitals and practices send pertinent clinical and demographic data to NCDR, which is then aggregated with similar data from around the country, analyzed, and published quarterly.

Currently, ACC maintains six NCDR registries, although there are plans to add more.

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The Future of Medical Imaging: Frank Seidelmann

Frank Seidelmann has worked in radiology for 35 years and is currently chair of the board and clinical director of neuroradiology at Radisphere National Radiology Group in Beachwood, Ohio. He was recently asked by imagingBiz.com about the past and future changes in medical imaging. Here are the summarized highlights of the interview:

Specialization and easy image transfer revolutionized medical imaging practice. As medical imaging technology improved, hospitals went from using medical imaging infrequently to demanding it in many different fields. PACS enabled radiologists and other medical imaging professionals to consult with one another easily, even if they were in different locations.

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Techs in Medical Imaging – How Should They Be Used?

If it can be automated, it will be automated. That’s what social analyst Daniel Pink wrote in his best-selling book A Whole New Mind. He also wrote that this simple fact is forcing people in developed countries to rethink job categories, and a recent article in the Journal of Diagnostic Imaging shows that radiologists, cardiologists and other medical imaging professionals are doing just that.

The article focuses on post-processing, or the reconstruction of images to make them cleaner visualizations. Turning a piece of medical imaging into a sharp 3D image, for example, is already “automatable” in some sense, and increased processing speeds – which are inevitable – will make automation even easier.

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Lessons from Medical Imaging Errors

A recent study in Pennsylvania highlights some of the common errors made in the medical imaging world.

The study, summarized in this article from HealthImaging.com, reports that of the over 650 radiology mistakes reported to the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority (PPSA),

50 percent were wrong-procedure or wrong-test errors.
30 percent were related to wrong-patient errors.
20 percent were wrong-site errors.

The break down by discipline:

45 percent were x-ray errors.
17.6 percent were CT errors.
15 percent were mammography errors.
The remaining were errors in MRI, ultrasound, PET scan, DEXA scan, nuclear medicine, and interventional radiology.

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Innovation Delivers Higher Quality Care at a Lower Cost

Fractional Flow Reserve (FFR) – a technique used in conjunction with cardiac medical imaging – is proving to be both a cost-saving and results-improving procedure, according to an article in Diagnostic and Interventional Cardiology.

FFR, which is used during a routine cardiac catheterization, measures the severity of blood flow blockages in coronary arteries. It helps physicians to better identify which specific lesion or lesions are responsible for a deficient blood supply to the heart.

Since the famous FAME study of 2009, which showed that FFR-guided PCI led to better outcomes than angiography-guided PCI, medical researchers around the world have been working to corroborate FAME’s results. Studies from the United Kingdom, France, and Italy have done just that.

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Is More Medical Imaging Regulation Coming?

Medical imaging – with the exception of breast imaging – has been less regulated than most other healthcare procedures. But that’s likely to change soon.

According to Matthew Morgan, M.D., assistant professor of radiology at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center, medical imaging professionals need to be ready to adapt. “A doctor with old habits and perceptions will have a chance to see where he or she could get lost in the future if they don’t make changes,” he says in a recent article in Health Data Management.

Increased medical imaging regulation will be driven primarily by the following:

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