West Feliciana Hospital (WFH) has been serving patients in the small town of St. Francisville, Louisiana, since 1970, but its imaging capabilities were limited for a long time. As a result, the hospital gained a bit of a reputation among referring physicians in the area—when in doubt, they would just avoid WFH altogether and send patients more than 30 miles away to Baton Rouge.

If you put a leading-edge 3D visualization platform in the hands of a fearlessly tech-forward radiologist, don’t be surprised if some real innovation emerges. That’s one lesson to be drawn from a recent cross-subspecialty adaptation of a Fujifilm Synapse® 3D component called Sector MPR. 

Heading into the economically and politically turbulent year that 2018 is sure to be, radiology practices need all the navigational help they can get if they want to not only survive, but thrive in these uncertain times. In-depth assists are available, for free, from vRad for those dealing with staffing shortages, data security concerns, final-read demands and overall practice-performance issues. Here are descriptions and links to online resources that will help practice leaders navigate the course to becoming a high performance radiology practice.

Look to RSNA 2017 for hints on what to prepare for in 2018 and you may take some comfort in the familiar: The profession-wide challenges and opportunities that were common across radiology over the past year aren’t clearing out to make room for entirely new concerns and changes. However, you’ll also need to reckon with the reality of ever-advancing—and in many areas, only accelerating—change.

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.

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.

By attempting to shatter the status quo and shift toward value-based care, the radiology industry is, in a way, sacrificing today’s monetary gains for a better tomorrow. It’s a smart, impressively noble move, but one that hasn’t been easy—and likely won’t get much easier in the immediate future. 

For the team at the Froedtert Health and the Medical College of Wisconsin (FH and MCW) in Milwaukee, Conserus Workflow Intelligence is the solution that keeps on giving.