The Radiological Society of North America's annual conference continues to be the place to take the pulse of the industry, and these were the top trends spotted by our reporting team

The consolidation trend gathered steam in the radiology private-practice sector in 2013, a year in which the average size of the nation’s largest private practices increased from 46 FTE radiologist in 2012 to 50

The Radiological Society of North American announced that Richard L. Baron, M.D., FACR, is its new Board chairman and N. Reed Dunnick, M.D., is its new president

Preliminary numbers released by the Radiological Society of North America show that attendance was similar to last year's numbers

The recent upheavals in the world of health care have meant the arrival of new challenges with each passing year, and owing to imaging’s contributions to escalating costs, radiology has been especially hard hit in the past. 2014 will prove to be no exception, bringing a fresh slate of reimbursement and market challenges, according to Jeff Maze, director of business intelligence for Zotec Partners. “Understanding these issues, as well as their potential impact on the business of radiology, will be mission critical,” he says.

Our company is fortunate to have the opportunity to work with a large number of single and multisite imaging centers each year. This affords us the opportunity to observe and benchmark the financial and operating trends of a statistically significant sample size of imaging centers across the nation.

Patient-centered health care has been a buzzword for some time, but the middle ground where patients and their providers meet is always shifting, according to the presenters of a December 3 session at the 2013 annual meeting of the RSNA in Chicago, Illinois. Susan John, MD; Elliot Fishman, MD; and Brent Wagner, MD, presented “Patient-Centered Radiology” to explore how engagement with patients is changing. As Wagner puts it, “All the things we might do to make our practices more patient-centric are a balancing act between opportunities and challenges.”

I attended my first annual meeting of the RSNA in 2006. I was, to put it mildly, unprepared. I remember being first astonished and then exhausted by its scale. I also remember carrying a cell phone—not a smartphone (and not even a phone with a camera), but just a regular old flip phone, good for nothing but talking and texting. On the exhibition floor, 64-slice CT was big news. PACS developers told me that they had a hard time getting some radiologists to use email, much less their new Web-based tools.