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. 

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.

Researchers from the department of radiology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center tracked improvements after implementing an image quality reporting system in their clinical practice. The PACS-integrated software allowed radiologists to quickly and easily fill out incident reports for a variety of issues, including missing images, incomplete documentation and labeling, and problems with the image library.