Case Studies

The past several years have seen the development of a de facto stealth campaign against screening mammography. “Vast Study Casts Doubts on Value of Mammograms,” the New York Times bullhorned in 2014. “Why Getting a Mammogram May Cause More Trouble Than It’s Worth,” a Prevention headline blared in 2016. “It’s Time to End Mammograms, Some Experts Say,” trumpeted Time this past December. All of this is fueled, of course, by the never-ending disputes over guidelines issued by numerous authoritative groups.

In a California emergency room, a trauma patient in critical condition is wheeled in following a motorcycle accident. In Texas, a patient presenting with stroke-like symptoms is brought into the hospital by frantic family members.

To meet the latest guidelines on promptness from the American Heart Association (AHA) and American Stroke Association (ASA), providers must image suspected stroke patients within 20 minutes of their arrival. For a brain deprived of oxygen by a blood clot, every second counts.

Medical historians may one day look back on 2018 as the year having a stroke stopped bringing an inescapably bleak prognosis to victims who went a while before noticing the symptoms.

The Miami Cancer Institute (MCI) started nearly 10 years ago as a collection of widely distributed service lines without an identifiable physical presence. The idea was to bring together local and regional cancer experts from every medical discipline and every support service. The vision was mass collaboration around providing world-class cancer care to patients from across the Southeastern U.S. as well as Latin America and the Caribbean.

Natural language processing (NLP)—the concept of training computer programs to extract specific content from words and phrases—has existed in one form or another since the 1950s, but its potential to impact radiology has only been brought into focus in recent years. Vendors all over the world, including vRad, a MEDNAX company, are working around the clock to see just how much NLP can do to revolutionize healthcare—and they are finding that it can do quite a lot.

Today’s radiology leaders face a significant number of challenges, including complex reimbursement policies, evolving technologies, and increasing demands for 24/7 subspecialty care. MEDNAX Radiology Solutions hosted a webinar on Feb. 21, 2018, that focused on these challenges and what leaders can do to ensure their practices thrive in today’s growing, competitive marketplace.

When five-hospital health system HIMA San Pablo sent an imaging contingent from its home base in Puerto Rico to RSNA in Chicago back in 2003, no one in the group could have foreseen how fortuitous their trip to the Windy City would prove almost a decade and a half later. 

If you’re going to operate a hospital outpatient imaging facility so distant to the nearest city that your location overlooks a sprawling cow pasture, you need to give patients a reason to make the drive. OGH Imaging in Grand Coteau, LA.—population 939—has been doing just that ever since opening its doors in 2005. 

Six years ago, the non-invasive cardiovascular lab (NICL) at 540-bed St. Dominic Hospital in Jackson, Mississippi, faced something of an uncertain future. The rules for maintaining accreditation, set by intersocietal accreditation commissions, require that all vascular exams get interpreted within 48 hours of image acquisition. For cardiac exams, the read must wait no longer than 24 hours.

2018 has already been a year full of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and those technologies are sure to receive a lot of attention March 5-9 at HIMSS 2018 in Las Vegas.

West Feliciana Hospital (WFH) has been serving patients in the small town of St. Francisville, Louisiana, since 1970, but its imaging capabilities were limited for a long time. As a result, the hospital gained a bit of a reputation among referring physicians in the area—when in doubt, they would just avoid WFH altogether and send patients more than 30 miles away to Baton Rouge.