From the June 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


DMBN: Further with the innovations, has there been anything brought to the table by a SIIM member that has really caught your attention or really excited you?

Geis: I’ve seen so many companies! It starts with one person showing up saying I’ve got this idea or I’ve written this one little piece of software what do you think? And you encourage them and lo and behold, it turns into one of the major players in the imaging IT space. I think you’re going to see at this year’s SIIM those people showing up having actually developed the idea into a true company, albeit very tiny. Now they have more than an idea, they have a company and they’re thinking about all the issues that go along with delivering their product to the public and supporting it.


DMBN: Is there anything that you’d really like to see?

Geis: Well, I guess there are two parts to that answer, when I think of problems that need to be solved. First, there are already IT solutions being used in other industries that I think could be applied to radiology and medical imaging and provide a huge amount of value that you could demonstrate easily. For example, what I call workflow engines, the software that is used for lean processes, that’s applicable to radiology and I think there’s a big need and a huge market for it. I’m seeing people working on moving to the next level of IT services that are again available in other industries to provide true interoperability and more of a service-oriented architecture to delivering the images or transmitting data. But we’re still behind other industries, so we have to take the systems we have now and apply the new technology, it’s a wide open field right now.

In terms of other things, I think decision support is an area where radiologists would benefit. It’s just too hard to keep up with all the literature coming out about the differential diagnosis of a finding and the recommendation for treatment or follow up. So a way to be able to use IT to incorporate that into a radiology report, I see that as a large need that isn’t being met yet.

DMBN: In our February issue, our cover story was about how the future of PACS may be without the “A” that is, the archiving. The argument was things like the EHR, for example, might take over some of the role of PACS. Have you witnessed any of that shift?

I think you’re seeing that happen everywhere. Having said that, it’s not trivial — there are issues with imaging data that are different than other kinds of data. You need to understand the nuances and idiosyncrasies of imaging data and how those files are stored and the metadata that is with each image and how you’re going to deal with those. I agree that we’re seeing the archiving part going into the enterprise and that’s fine as long as it’s being done correctly.

June 2013 Magazine

Read more stories from the June 2013 issue

More Magazine Features

More Industry Headlines