Earlier this week, emergency medicine specialist Dr. Sandra Schneider identified emergency department overcrowding as a symptom of hospital overcrowding in part one of my interview with her. In part two yesterday, we identified better collaboration between medical imaging and emergency care leaders as critical towards managing overcrowding.
In the final part of my interview below, we put our focus squarely on the patient, as we learn how all of medicine must work together to improve the cost efficiency of care, without sacrificing improvements to patient outcomes.
How do you see the new focus on improving patient outcomes impacting emergency medical care and/or reimbursements?
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Over the last several years, emergency department overcrowding has become a troubling issue, one that can become an easy scapegoat for the massive health care cost overruns we have become accustomed to hearing about.
In the business world, “gatekeeper” has come to be known as the person who controls access to the decision maker. In medicine, a primary care physician monitors a patient’s health care and serves as gatekeeper for HMO services. If you’re a radiologist reading this, it’s likely that you’ve never considered yourself a gatekeeper of anything.
As an industry, we should be long past the question of what we are trying to do; rather, we should be asking how, when and where. Your medical imaging vendor should be guiding you along this path. Unfortunately, in the medical imaging arena, some Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) vendors are notorious for being niche players. They know all the details of what to do at the radiology department level to improve workflow but get so caught up in those details that they fail to understand the big picture of how to spread imaging to the entire enterprise and when and where you store the vast amount of data. You need a 
While doctors, in general, are in high demand, cardiologists and cardiovascular imaging specialists, in particular, are actively being recruited by a number of hospital organizations, such as the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic. The day-to-day costs of running and managing a private practice combined with declining reimbursements are pushing cardiologists to seek out hospitals as their first line of defense. Having willing recruits makes filling these critical positions that much easier.
Thinking of making big changes in your medical imaging system? Here’s some inspiration.
