If you work in radiology group practice, it’s likely you are considering your market position and evaluating whether you should be growing—if you haven’t expanded already. Depth of subspecialization, round-the-clock service and economies of scale are all necessities for imaging in markets experiencing consolidation. In short, if your hospital and health system customers are increasing in size, you should be as well.

As accountable care organizations and other forms of integrated delivery networks take root nationwide, independent radiology practices are experiencing a phenomenon not regularly seen since the 1990s: capitated contracts. “The biggest change our group has seen recently is the rise in capitated contracts, where we receive a fixed reimbursement for providing imaging for a whole patient population,” says Whitney Edmister, MD, PhD, of Desert Radiologists, a 54-physician practice based in Las Vegas, Nevada. “We receive a monthly payment to provide all necessary imaging services, allowing health plans to better control their costs.”

UnityPoint Health, formerly Iowa Healthcare, a multi-city integrated delivery system based in Des Moines, recently underwent a transformation aimed at empowering primary care physicians to take the lead in care coordination for patients.

As health care moves from fee-for-service to value-based medicine, and, eventually, to population health management, imaging is facing the imperative to redefine its role in the care continuum. “We’ll be focused closely on value and outcome measures in the environment we’re calling imaging 3.0,” says Mike Tilkin, CIO of the American College of Radiology (ACR). “Radiologists will play pivotal roles throughout the care process—from the time a study is ordered to being engaged as a consultant throughout the care cycle to being a resource to the patient.”

In 2004, as Hurricane Charley closed in on Florida, the CIO of Walmart, Linda Dillman, wondered which items the store should be stocking up on in advance of the storm. Employees suggested flashlights and batteries. Dillman had another idea: diving into terabytes of data on past shopping behaviors, she discovered that ahead of hurricanes, the two most-purchased items at Walmart stores were beer and strawberry Pop-Tarts. Walmart stores in Florida increased their inventories of these items, and by the time the hurricane passed over, the company had made a killing.

As accountable-care organizations (ACOs) take root around the country, radiology, as predicted by many, is proving to be a troublesome link in the care chain. Jordan Halter, vice president of solutions for Virtual Radiologic (vRad), says, “Radiology risks being seen as a cost center, to be managed, in the ACO model. Radiology must fundamentally and permanently alter itself to survive in the new fee-for-value health-care world. It’s no longer good enough to be available and affable; groups need to be accountable, affordable, and aligned with their hospitals, as Alan Matsumoto, MD, and the ACR® Council Steering Committee pointed out earlier this year. Radiology needs to be seen as a strategic partner with a seat at the leadership table, not as a cost center.”

On June 6, 2013, at the annual meeting of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (in Dallas, Texas), Eliot Siegel, MD, chief of radiology and nuclear imaging at VA Maryland Health Care System (Baltimore), copresented “Personalized Medicine.” He envisions a promising future for radiology—if the profession can surmount the obstacles that it faces, when it comes to big data. “Medicine in general is behind the curve on big data,” Siegel says, “and we have the chance to get radiology ready for the coming era of big data and personalized medicine, if we can address five key challenges.”

In the most recent issue of this publication, I spoke of an emerging business model for radiology practices that want to maintain their independence while making the best use of economies of scale: local and/or regional affiliation. As hospitals and health systems continue to consolidate under emerging payment and delivery models, medical groups that hope to continue serving these customers as independent entities will have to increase in scope and scale to survive.