Six years ago, two radiologists with dissimilar backgrounds and divergent clinical interests put their heads together and launched a new practice. One physician was an academic subspecialized in musculoskeletal reads. The other, a private practitioner, concentrated on oncologic imaging. That’s how Transparent Imaging was born, powered by Konica Minolta.
Identifying the signs of severe aortic stenosis is typically a fairly straightforward process for cardiologists. In some cases, however, the patient’s symptoms present in a way that is outside of the norm.
Prosthesis-patient mismatch (PPM) is the phenomenon that occurs when the effective orifice area of a prosthetic heart valve isn’t adequately sized to meet a patient’s blood flow requirements. More is known today about PPM than ever before—but there is still so much to learn.
In a private dining room in Miami, something unusual is happening. Leaders from competing imaging centers are openly discussing their best practices—even sharing vendor recommendations and operational strategies that have doubled their volumes while cutting costs in half.
Pulmonary embolism (PE) remains one of the leading causes of cardiovascular death in the United States. TriStar Health, part of HCA Healthcare, has made PE a priority by bringing together a multidisciplinary team and adopting AI-enabled workflows to support timely diagnosis and treatment. This approach is designed to drive consistent, high-quality care – whether patients are seen at a large hospital or a community ER.
When it comes to diagnosing cancer, radiologists examine digital images and pathologists scrutinize slides. Only occasionally do the two collaborate prior to meetings of the tumor board or multidisciplinary team (MDT).
When working at a high volume breast imaging provider, radiologists can’t afford speed bumps. But hiccups in workflow are inevitable when a radiologist is forced to constantly switch between different workstations, each with their own interfaces and controls.
Apple used to push the world to “think different.” Today, the profession of radiology is being driven to think differentiation. And the impetus is issuing not from a single corporation, but rather from myriad market forces—from commoditization to consolidation to, perhaps most pressingly, ever-narrowing profit margins.
Through the exceptionally tight partnership of vRad Chief Medical Officer, Ben Strong, MD, and Chief Information Officer, Shannon Werb—explored in Part I of this interview—vRad has achieved a synergistic melding of those concepts that truly are driving clinical innovation, as evidenced by the discussion with Strong and Werb.
Earlier this year vRad and San Diego-based XIFIN (pronounced zy-fin) began closely collaborating on an online workflow that will offer referring physicians a one-stop fusion of all diagnostic reports—from radiology, pathology and clinical labs.
As an early adopter of speech recognition technology in 2000, Richard H. Wiggins, III, MD, CIIP, FSIIM, witnessed a stunning reduction in turnaround times (TAT) at the University of Utah Health Care, Salt Lake City.
Breast-imaging interpretations by telemedicine? More than a few have said that it couldn’t be done—or, at least, that it couldn’t be done well.
