No world-class radiology residency program ever attained its excellence without securing and sustaining department-wide buy-in on the criticality of teaching the next generation of radiologists. Clinical care and research don’t need to be de-emphasized in any way, but every faculty member in the department must be committed to teaching while sincerely appreciating the value of the residency program in ensuring the present and future health of the profession.

There’s been a lot of talk over the years about radiology’s “image problem.” Survey after survey shows that many patients don’t fully understand what radiology is or what a radiologist does, and in a healthcare environment increasingly focused on demonstrating value, that’s certainly a reason to be alarmed. But there’s something happening right now that could help with radiology’s image problem: more radiologists are starting to run for public office.

Once considered some of the most contractually stable and fiscally secure practitioners in all of U.S. medicine, radiologists are today concerned about their very future—and more than a few are right to be worried. From nosediving reimbursement to successive consolidation, from constantly expanding technologies to fitfully pinballing policymaking, the pressures have been varied and unrelenting for years now. What’s more, the pace of change is even now only accelerating. How best to rise to this moment with realistic hopes of emerging stronger than ever?

It has become standard practice over the years for imaging providers to maintain data for at least five years, but according to an article published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology, perhaps that data should be kept indefinitely. 

The biggest problem we have as practice administrators or physicians is that we see management reports illustrating the end result and process failures contributing to revenue declines are not evident. As long as we, as an industry, insist on the lowest price, we will continue to get what we pay for in terms of over-automation and failures of process controls.

The imaging division at John Muir Health in California’s Contra Costa County has been supplying topnotch image-handling capabilities to end users located across the system’s sprawling family tree—three hospitals, seven outpatient imaging centers, a 1,000-plus physician network and a dozen or so sites providing outpatient, urgent-care and surgery services—since 2001. That’s when Sectra PACS entered the picture for the Walnut Creek-based organization.

The IT team at Western Reserve Hospital, a 105-bed, physician-owned institution in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, already had considerable experience with remotely hosted solutions. In 2015, the time came to consider a remote option for its new PACS. 

While helping to steer 105-bed Western Reserve Hospital in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, toward a remotely hosted PACS solution, Jeffrey Unger, MD, repeatedly voiced one crucial concern: Would he and his fellow radiologists have to wait at their workstations, precious seconds ticking away, while PACS servers sitting hundreds of miles away processed massive datasets?