MINNEAPOLIS, Dec. 2, 2013-- Vital Images, Inc., a Toshiba Medical Systems Group Company and leading provider of advanced visualization and analysis solutions for healthcare providers, will feature new clinical enhancements to its VitreaAdvanced® software in its booth (North Hall, #8130) at the 99th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago, December 1-5.

In 2004, as Hurricane Charley closed in on Florida, the CIO of Walmart, Linda Dillman, wondered which items the store should be stocking up on in advance of the storm. Employees suggested flashlights and batteries. Dillman had another idea: diving into terabytes of data on past shopping behaviors, she discovered that ahead of hurricanes, the two most-purchased items at Walmart stores were beer and strawberry Pop-Tarts. Walmart stores in Florida increased their inventories of these items, and by the time the hurricane passed over, the company had made a killing.

As accountable-care organizations (ACOs) take root around the country, radiology, as predicted by many, is proving to be a troublesome link in the care chain. Jordan Halter, vice president of solutions for Virtual Radiologic (vRad), says, “Radiology risks being seen as a cost center, to be managed, in the ACO model. Radiology must fundamentally and permanently alter itself to survive in the new fee-for-value health-care world. It’s no longer good enough to be available and affable; groups need to be accountable, affordable, and aligned with their hospitals, as Alan Matsumoto, MD, and the ACR® Council Steering Committee pointed out earlier this year. Radiology needs to be seen as a strategic partner with a seat at the leadership table, not as a cost center.”

On June 6, 2013, at the annual meeting of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (in Dallas, Texas), Eliot Siegel, MD, chief of radiology and nuclear imaging at VA Maryland Health Care System (Baltimore), copresented “Personalized Medicine.” He envisions a promising future for radiology—if the profession can surmount the obstacles that it faces, when it comes to big data. “Medicine in general is behind the curve on big data,” Siegel says, “and we have the chance to get radiology ready for the coming era of big data and personalized medicine, if we can address five key challenges.”

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).

For the vendor-neutral archive (VNA), James M. Conyers says, making the A stand for archive no longer adequately describes the technology’s true capabilities. Conyers, national director of Enterprise Architecture Solutions for FUJIFILM Medical Systems, explains, “It’s more of an architecture than an archive. An archive is just one component of what the VNA actually does.”

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

As accountability in health care becomes an increasingly critical priority, many anticipate a future in which radiologists are employed by hospitals attempting to share risk and align incentives. Accountability can be achieved without employment, however, according to Carl Black, MD, of Utah Radiology Associates (URA), Orem/Provo, a 24-physician practice covering five hospital systems, including the oft-lauded Intermountain Healthcare (Orem). The practice’s relationship with Intermountain Healthcare was the subject of a presentation made by Black on July 28, 2013, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the annual meeting of the AHRA