Case Studies

In healthcare, as in life, relationships evolve over time. Take, for instance, Atlantic Radiology Associates (ARA) in Savannah, Ga., a 12-radiologist group serving hospitals throughout Georgia, South Carolina and Florida. ARA first started working with vRad, the country’s largest teleradiology provider, back in 2007, with vRad handling preliminary weekend and overnight reads for one of the group’s busiest hospitals.

No world-class radiology residency program ever attained its excellence without securing and sustaining department-wide buy-in on the criticality of teaching the next generation of radiologists. Clinical care and research don’t need to be de-emphasized in any way, but every faculty member in the department must be committed to teaching while sincerely appreciating the value of the residency program in ensuring the present and future health of the profession.

Eight years ago, Women’s Imaging Associates in Birmingham, Ala., was a small, well-respected mammography practice serving six OB/GYN offices in its area. Today, having embraced a 100% telemedicine model, its three fulltime breast specialists read images for 22 client facilities scattered around the U.S.—not only OB offices but also outpatient imaging centers and hospitals large and small. 

For small rural hospitals such as McCurtain Memorial Hospital in Idabel, Okla., an on-staff radiologist is a luxury. After losing its single in-house radiologist, the facility floated between several different teleradiology providers before finally landing on vRad—largely due to vRad’s strong breast health portfolio.

The radiology job market has had its fair share of ups and downs, as one can see by simply scanning the last 15 years of data from Merritt Hawkins, a popular physician search firm. In 2003, radiology was the No. 1 most requested search assignment at Merritt Hawkins. 

Once considered some of the most contractually stable and fiscally secure practitioners in all of U.S. medicine, radiologists are today concerned about their very future—and more than a few are right to be worried. From nosediving reimbursement to successive consolidation, from constantly expanding technologies to fitfully pinballing policymaking, the pressures have been varied and unrelenting for years now. What’s more, the pace of change is even now only accelerating. How best to rise to this moment with realistic hopes of emerging stronger than ever?

The shift to value-based care is looking like less of a transition and more of a reality for imaging departments.

At Akron Children’s Hospital, the road to fully realized patient-centered care for kids leads to a scenario in which all patient information—including consent forms, admissions documents, diagnostic images and multimedia files—is readily accessible through the facility’s EHR.

If your hospital or healthcare system is like most others in the U.S. today, you have an EHR that’s proving expensive to maintain while working well below its potential for centralized, cost-saving image sharing. You’re fretting over non-DICOM images acquired with smartphones and insecurely siloed in numerous clinical departments. And you’re also talking a lot about enterprise imaging (EI) as a way to broach both those touchy topics and a host of others.

When it comes to ensuring patients receive the best possible imaging experience, Star Valley Medical Center in Afton, Wyo. went the extra mile so that patients don’t have to.

Imagine trying to find a white rabbit in a field of snow. This scenario is similar to what radiologists go through when looking for tumors in a woman with dense breasts, as both normal fibroglandular tissue and abnormal masses appear white on a mammogram.

Lawrence Carl, MD, is the medical director for Main Street Radiology (MSR) in Queens, N.Y., a board-certified radiologist and assistant radiology professor at Weill Cornell. His medical director responsibilities include keeping an eye out for emerging technologies to positively impact workflow and patient care in outpatient radiology. To that end, Dr. Carl leads MSR administration and technology professionals to multiple educational events each year.