Right now, just about anyone with a large enough line of credit can purchase a new, state-of-the-art MR or CT scanner. Going forward, what will separate the highly successful radiology practices from those muddling through—or hanging on for dear life—is not impressive equipment.

Radiologists at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital have blazed a new trail in social media, making their workplace the first hospital to have its own channel via an image-sharing app unofficially dubbed “Instagram for doctors.”

DR Systems, the privately held supplier of PACS, RIS and EHR systems based in San Diego—a highly regarded fixture in the radiology IT space for close to a quarter-century—has been acquired for $70 million by publicly traded Merge Healthcare.

At the current rate of innovation in healthcare and technology, how do we keep our kids informed of the types of careers available to them?  

The ubiquity of mobile computing across society and throughout healthcare has sharply raised expectations around the speed of communications. Where once referring physicians anticipated waits of several days to receive radiology reports, whether by courier, fax or sometimes even snail mail, they now bristle at lag times measured in hours or even minutes. Increasingly, patients want the same for themselves.

Assuming the American College of Radiology’s latest workforce survey reflects the radiology specialty in toto, male radiologists practicing fulltime outnumber their female peers more than 8 to 2.  

When news broke Feb. 2 that Murray Reicher, MD, had been named chief executive of DR Systems, the San Diego-based supplier of PACS, RIS and EHR systems, more than a few folks surely reacted with an audible “Huh?” After all, Reicher is well known as the founder of the 25-year-old company. Hadn’t he been running it all along?

Change is coming to radiology in ways the profession could not have anticipated in a pre-Affordable Care Act world. The forces driving the change are many and varied—economic, regulatory, technology-enabled—but one common denominator has emerged as the “cardiopulmonary system” of the transformation: hospitals under intense pressure to perform in order to survive.