If the triple aim—improved access to better-quality health care at a lower cost—is the goal of health-care reform, then patient-centered care is its soul. Throughout the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the authors took precautions to protect patients from the abuses of 1990s-era managed care, when profits appeared to trump patient care.

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.”

Managing emergency-department volume is a perennial challenge for hospitals, and at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center (SMRMC) in Reno, Nevada, emergency-department volume is only expected to grow, according to Helen Lidholm, CEO. “We’re assessing what our emergency-department volume is going to look like, based on what we know about our community and how our local patient population will be affected by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” she says. “Every community is different, but we’re anticipating higher volume in the emergency department.”

In February 2013, the ACR® Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute (HPI) released a brief¹ proposing a classification system for repeat medical-imaging studies. Richard Duszak, MD, CEO of HPI, says, “We wanted to propose a way to study the incidence, utilization, and appropriateness of repeat imaging for research and policy purposes. While that was our primary audience, and they would be researching this retrospectively, there is a lot of opportunity to do this in a prospective, real-time fashion for quality-improvement purposes.”

Mercy San Juan Medical Center is a 370-bed acute-care hospital in Carmichael, California, that is part of the not-for-profit Dignity Health System. It has experienced significant growth since it opened its doors in 1967—particularly following the 2009 introduction of a new patient tower that added 110 beds.

Since opening on February 17, 1910, the 375-bed Children’s Hospital Colorado (CHC), in Aurora has tried to be a leader in providing the best health-care outcomes for children.

Many radiology administrators remember purchasing their first or second PACS: It was probably no small financial commitment, and justifying the expense might have been a painful process.

When Duke University Health System (DUHS) in Durham, North Carolina, goes live with its full-blown Epic electronic health record (EHR) implementation in June 2013