Sharp HealthCare (San Diego, California) has undertaken multiple initiatives aimed at implementing organizational and service improvements, as well as enhanced patient care and clinical outcomes. Its latest endeavor is the imminent addition of a PACS that will accommodate non–DICOM images and that, as such, will facilitate enterprise image sharing across specialties, modalities, and facilities (as well as with clinical entities outside its boundaries).

In order to improve Lexmark’s Perceptive healthcare content management and workflow solutions and vendor neutral archive (VNA), Lexmark International has acquired leading PACS connectivity platform PACSGEAR for a cash purchase price of approximately $54 million

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%.

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

To get the attention of Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) attendees, Stamford, Conn.-based Fujifilm Medical demonstrated its latest version of Synapse PACs and Synapse RIS at the conference in Grapevine-Dallas, Texas, from June 6-9.

When Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath devastated New York, New York, in October 2012, perhaps no one was more vulnerable than the patients needing care in area hospitals. Eli Tarlow, CIO of the city’s Bellevue Hospital Center (BHC), recalls, “It was the best of times and worst of times—a natural event that no one could have prevented. You really see the best of your staff in moments of crisis, and that held true during Hurricane Sandy. Staff members at all levels volunteered to do anything necessary, from bringing needed supplies up and down many flights of stairs to helping with preparing or delivering food for patients. Nothing came between the employees and the work that needed to be done to maintain patient care.”

Having a tool kit of advanced visualization tools embedded in the PACS of the Keck Hospital of the University of Southern California (USC) has touched every aspect of the practice of Vinay Duddalwar, MD, FRCR. As abdominal-imaging section chief and director of the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center (NCCC) imaging department, Duddalwar reports

InMedica forecasts the world market for PACS, RIS, and CVIS to grow by more than $1 billion over the next 5 years.