A radiologist’s wish list for 2016

Eric Postal, MD

With all the changes occurring in the PACS administrator’s environment this past year, PARCA eNews decided to take a lighter approach to the final Q&A of 2015. We thought we’d talk to Eric Postal, MD, a practicing radiologist, to see what may be on his wish list for 2016. Dr. Postal is a board-certified radiologist at Virtual Radiologic (vRad), based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. vRad is a leading national teleradiology services and telemedicine company with over 350 U.S. board-certified and eligible physicians, 75 percent of whom are subspecialty trained. vRad interprets and processes patient imaging studies on the world’s largest and most advanced teleradiology PACS for more than 2,100 client hospital, health system and radiology group facilities in all 50 states. Dr. Postal has more than 15 years of experience in academic, hospital and private practice settings. He writes a blog from a radiologist’s perspective for DiagnosticImaging.com.

Resources for PACS adminstrators

From ARIs to Zoom, the PACS world is full of acronyms and even veteran professionals sometimes get lost in the alphabet soup. If you’ve ever had to pause to figure out what some all caps word stands for, there is a great resource online, just a click away. OTpedia is a great resource from OTech for anyone working in the PACS/IT world. The online resource is an exhaustive dictionary of acronyms for PACS and Healthcare IT professionals. It is fast, easy to use, and best of all, it is free. 

Click here to register.

News Roundup

RSNA 2015 101st annual meeting celebrates the future of radiology  

PARCA eNews – Dec. 4, 2015 – The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) wrapped up its year-long Centennial celebration at its 101st Annual Meeting and Scientific Assembly Dec. 4, held at McCormick Place, Chicago with a glimpse of radiology's future on exhibit in the popular RSNA Centennial Showcase.

HealthMyne Adds Epic EHR Data to Imaging Analytics Platform

Created by: Steven Davis-Art Director, HealthMyne

PARCA eNEWS – Nov. 17, 2015 – HealthMyne, an imaging informatics company, announced a major advance in their quantitative imaging analytics platform. Working together with Epic and University of Wisconsin Health, HealthMyne now offers radiologists unification of electronic health record (EHR) data and imaging information. 

HHS issues final rule for Health IT Certification

PARCA eNews – Oct. 6, 2015 – The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) today released final rules that simplify requirements. The new rules add new flexibilities for providers to make electronic health information available when and where it matters most and for health care providers. For consumers the aim of the revised rules are to make patient information readily, safely, through secure information exchange. 

ONC has published 2015 Edition Health IT Test procedures

PARCA eNews – Oct. 6, 2015 – ONC has adopted a new format for test procedures that is less prescriptive and more outcome-focused. ONC released draft test procedures concurrently with the release of the 2015 Edition proposed rule. 

Biomedical imaging at one-thousandth the cost

MIT researchers have developed 

a new biomedical imaging system 

that harnesses an off-the-shelf 

depth sensor such as Microsoft’s 

Kinect.

MIT News Office  – Nov. 23, 2015 – researchers have developed a biomedical imaging system that could ultimately replace a $100,000 piece of a lab equipment with components that cost just hundreds of dollars.

The system uses a technique called fluorescence lifetime imaging, which has applications in DNA sequencing and cancer diagnosis, among other things. So the new work could have implications for both biological research and clinical practice. The MIT researchers reported the new work in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Optica.

DoD Meets Interoperability Requirements for Electronic Health Records

PARCA eNews – Nov. 20, 2015 – The Defense Department has met the interoperability requirements for electronic health records as called for in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2014, according to DoD officials.

DoD and Veterans Affairs have two goals in integrating patients' records and making the information accessible by both agencies, said Chris Miller, the program executive officer for 

Defense Healthcare Management Systems. Those goals, he said, are to create a seamless health record, and modernize the software that clinicians and analysts in both agencies use.

Maintaining flexible accessibility with PACS-EMR integration

Antonia Wells, Chief Research &
Development Officer

By some estimates over 90 percent of the data in medical science is attributed to imaging. Whatever the actual number may be, it was certainly a factor in IBM’s decision to acquire Merge Healthcare, announced in August. Merge Healthcare is a Chicago-based provider of enterprise imaging, interoperability and clinical systems aimed at advancing healthcare. It was recently recognized as a top vendor in the KLAS 2015 Midterm Performance Review: Software & Services report. It provides enterprise and cloud-based technologies for image intensive specialties that provide access to any image, anywhere, any time. Merge’s technology platforms are used at more than 7,500 U.S. healthcare sites, as well as most of the world’s leading clinical research institutes and pharmaceutical firms to manage a growing body of medical images. Merge also provides clinical trials software with end-to-end study support in a single platform and other intelligent health data and analytics solutions.  PARCA eNews spoke with Merge’s Antonia (Toni) Wells, Chief Research & Development Officer at Merge Healthcare, Mark Bronkalla, vice president of Solutions Management, and Jim Boritz, VP PACS Development about integrating PACS with EMRs and EHRs.  In the Q&A format below, T. stands for Antonia, M. is Mark and J. is Jim.

PARCA eNews returns to bi-monthly distribution

PARCA has been trialing the monthly distribution of our newsletter. The decision to move to a monthly distribution trial was triggered by survey results indicating a preference for monthly, and by the Board’s desire to improve the engagement with our members, and, in addition, the increase in quality worldly PACS related material. During the last month, the PARCA board has re-assessed our trial and our engagement policy and found that whilst the quality of our content has improved, you, the members have been less likely to review the newsletter. As such, the decision has been made to return to newsletters being produced every two months.

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