The US Navy deployed its first PACS—a military-specified system with limited functionality—in 1996. Since then, the Navy has operated multiple PACS from a variety of vendors, all selected through a contracting process monitored by the US Department of Defense (DoD). “Our purchasing process enables us always to select the best of breed,” Edwin Doorn

The server requirements of any modern hospital are daunting; the back-end processing power necessary to operate multiple health information systems across an enterprise of any size requires an ever-shifting configuration of blades, proxies, failover systems, and disaster-recovery solutions. It’s no wonder, then, that a five-hospital system with 2

“The more you see, the better you are,” Javier Beltran, MD, FACR, says. “You’re exposed to so much pathology that you’ve seen it all, at the end of the day. It brings your expertise to another level.” Beltran is talking about what might be called extreme subspecialization. Beltran is a musculoskeletal radiologist. He estimates that he personally

How do you acquire the high–field-strength open MRI unit of your dreams in a tough economy? Unless you had already budgeted a cool million before the economy tanked, it may be difficult. David Nelson, director of outpatient imaging for BayCare Health System, Clearwater, Fla, overcame his lack of comfort with open systems last year and did just that

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), signed into law on February 17, includes $19 billion in funding for health care IT initiatives through the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH). How these funds will be distributed, however, remains unclear, and radiology practices and hospital

Frank Seidelmann, D.O., is cofounder and chair of Franklin and Seidelmann Subspecialty Radiology, Beachwood, Ohio. After bearing witness to countless imaging booms and busts over the course of 30-plus years in the field, Seidelmann looks to subspecialization as the trend that will change the face of radiology as we know it in the years to come.

When Vanderbilt Imaging Services LLC, the freestanding outpatient radiology practice associated with Vanderbilt Medical Center, Nashville, Tenn, opened its doors in 1999, the center decided to implement an alternative to the traditional RIS configuration: a hosted RIS. The benefits of a vendor-hosted RIS solution include increased reliability,

A new study1 finding that radiology order-entry (ROE) and decision-support (DS) tools act to curtail utilization rates for advanced imaging is being celebrated as proof that a White House proposal to deploy radiology benefit managers (RBMs) as Medicare gatekeepers is unnecessary and ill conceived.