Football injuries to NFL players have given the game a black eye. But now some good is coming of the risk, and it has much to do with a promising use of CT imaging.

For vendor-neutral archive technology, a funny thing happened on the way to HIMSS15. Over the past couple of years, healthcare providers have recognized en masse that simply setting up a VNA to store all manner of patient-associated content is just dipping a toe in the VNA water. 

At a time when 85% of physicians are viewing diagnostic images via electronic medical records, the opportunity is ripe to realize true enterprise imaging. More of those docs should be saying goodbye to walled-off image silos and hello to a centralized, always-open image depot. 

XIFIN, the revenue-cycle management vendor based in San Diego, has begun working with teleradiology titan vRad to market a one-stop mashup of all diagnostic reports from radiology, pathology and clinical labs.

When it comes to imaging the heart to detect coronary disease and other disorders of the ticker, cardiac PET/CT makes SPECT look silly just for trying. And that’s just on the clinical front. It’s got its economic attributes too.    

When is the right time to add a vendor-neutral archive (VNA)? For DCH Health System, a Tuscaloosa-based hospital enterprise serving West Alabama, the decision coincided with an ambitious expansion of the cardiology department of its flagship hospital, 600-bed DCH Regional Medical Center.

Through both organic growth and merger-and-acquisition activity, the New Brunswick, NJ-based mega-practice University Radiology has increased in size from 61 to 96 radiologists in just six years. The task of technologically knitting all practice and service sites together into one integrated whole has fallen to practice CIO Alberto Goldszal, PhD.

Outshined by the introduction of the Apple Watch, Apple’s ResearchKit, a new iOS software framework was also introduced at the Apple event this week, allowing physicians and scientists collect and monitor clinical data from iPhone users who volunteer to join medical research studies.