As the demands placed on hospitals and health systems continue to intensify, the hospital-based radiology group will have to evolve to meet its constituents’ changing needs, according to Chad Calendine, MD, CMO of Optimal Radiology Partners. “It’s a story that is being written as we speak,” he says. “The underlying principle is that radiology groups need to be more aligned with their hospitals, and they have to be conspicuously and actively involved in helping the hospitals reach their goals.”

At Charlotte Orthopedic Hospital (COH) in North Carolina, a change similar to that happening in many hospitals across the country is underway: The facility is becoming more strongly linked to its parent organization, Novant Health. As Charnaye Bosley, RT, manager of radiology at COH, explains, “Where before, each facility kind of stood on its own and practiced what was best for it, now we’re all more deeply connected. We have a large footprint in and outside of the Charlotte community, but patients didn’t realize what a large network we have. Our goal, moving forward, is to be integrated, and part of my role is making that transition as smooth as possible.”

The emergence of a new, powerful imaging modality is cause for both celebration and consternation, and digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) has proven no exception to this rule, according to participants in a June 8 educational forum at the 2013 meeting of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM), held in Grapevine, Texas. Early results from sites offering DBT to their patients have been nothing short of extraordinary: X-ray Associates of New Mexico (XRANM) in Albuquerque, for instance, reports a 48% reduction in its recall rate, while the University of Pittsburg Medical Center (UPMC) in Pennsylvania has seen a 40% increase in detection of invasive breast cancers, with a reduction in false positives of 15%.

When contemplating a potential transaction between an imaging center and a hospital, including the appropriate people and committing to transparent communication between the parties are essential to promoting a successful transaction environment. In order to achieve the desired goals of both parties, several key individuals should be active participants during the entire deal cycle, including the administrator and/or key executive from the center, a hospital representative, legal counsel for both parties, and an experienced valuation company.

For a cardiologist, Wm. Guy Weigold, MD, spends an unusual amount of time in front of a monitor. “I happen to be a cardiologist who has expertise in cardiac CT,” he explains. “I spend the majority of my time looking at images.” Weigold is director of the cardiac CT program at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, DC, and he directs

When Rex Healthcare (Raleigh, North Carolina) went shopping for a cardiology image-management solution, it was looking for three things: good vendor support, the ability for cardiologists to access prior studies from the radiology PACS, and a willing development partner to grow with as it built an employed cardiology practice and a new heart

Named as one of the best US hospitals by US News & World Report for 5 years, Indiana University Health (IU Health), Indianapolis, aims to provide a unified standard of preeminent, patient-centered care in partnership with the Indiana University School of Medicine. Strategies for attaining such a goal include the deployment of increasingly

If imaging is to visualize its future accurately, it must do so by looking to business models outside the health-care arena, according to Dieter Enzmann, MD, chief of the department of radiology at the University of California–Los Angeles. “There are three generic models that exist in virtually every mature market,” he says. “There’s always a low