Case Studies

Emergency departments (EDs) are busier than ever, and ED imaging volumes are up almost across the board.

Rare is the radiology practice of any size that has never had to sweat out the absence of one or more radiologists as unread non-emergent studies piled up.

Health-policy educator and researcher Patricia (“Polly”) Pittman, PhD, co-founded the GW Health Workforce Institute at George Washington University (GWHWI) in April 2015.

If you’ve ever booked a trip online using a site such as Kayak or Expedia, you’ve seen something of the future of healthcare computing.

When we unveiled the next-generation upgrades to Fujifilm’s broad, integrated Synapse portfolio at RSNA last fall, our newest enterprise imaging technology Synapse 5 was the hit of the show. This wasn’t surprising. After all, PACS represents the cornerstone of the comprehensive Synapse line of solutions—a product family that also includes innovative VNA, 3D, RIS, cardiovascular and mobile offerings.

INTEGRIS Health, Oklahoma’s largest healthcare network, recently had to find a solution to a significant problem: its nine hospital PACS were out of space, their software was out of date and the situation was out of control.

As CEO of a growing, multifaceted business enterprise, Matthew Lemak delegates many operating-budget decisions to the people who have the most to gain—or lose—from their choices. On capital budgeting, he is considerably more hands-on.

Often lost amid all the talk of U.S. healthcare’s volume-to-value transformation is the plain and simple truth that volume doesn’t stop mattering just because value matters more than it did before. This is especially germane to provider organizations caring for patients at the population level.

It’s 2016. If you’re not thinking about joining the growing ranks of healthcare providers that are digitally storing all clinical information from across the enterprise so it’s secure, expandable and readily accessible to authorized caregivers working anywhere and anytime, it’s time to wake up and smell the vendor-neutral archive (VNA).

When your organization puts values first, those values inform everything, from how patients are treated to the technology you install to provide care.

University Hospitals in Cleveland is half of the way through implementing a true enterprise image-management solution—a.k.a. VNA (vendor neutral archive)—and one key insider sees the advance as “a huge goldmine for patient care.”

Radiographs of the ankle, hip and knee getting coded as mammograms; a popular code-assist product failing right out of the gate and remaining troublesome months later; small billing companies shuttering their offices, leaving physician practices without any billing services at all. These are some of the scenarios reported in the wake of the Oct. 1, 2015, launch of the 10th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10).