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New JDI Blog
By Janice Honeyman-Buck, PhD
Welcome to the new JDI blog on SIIMshare. We are opening the floor to comments about articles from our readers and hope to get a good dialogue going.
I want to highlight a few articles in this first blog. Tony Pan, Bradley J. Erickson, and Daniel S. Marcus have created three whitepapers on the need to create an imaging infrastructure for research. The authors describe the complexity of including in vivo imaging data in clinical research and suggest techniques that must be applied to successfully manage the additional data. In part 1 (published in print in the August 2012 issue of JDI), the general workflow considerations for imaging-based clinical research are described. They look at the workflow from the development and distribution of the imaging protocol through integrating the image information with clinical information and the creation of management status reports. In addition, software solutions that support the clinical trials are identified. Parts two and three are published in JDI online first and further develop recommendations for integrating and managing imaging data in clinical research. Part two presents the requirements for data management of imaging data and part three describes the security and privacy requirements for supporting images used in research. All three whitepapers are freely available on Springerlink’s JDI website which means the full text of the articles can be read and download by anyone.
I suggest you read these interesting papers, post comments and we can start a dialogue on how this new workflow can be accomplished to make the integration of imaging data in clinical research easier, more manageable, and more secure.
Brad Levin’s letter to the editor refers to an article by Bruce Reiner and Matthew McKinley published in our June issue. The article “Application of Innovation Economics to Medical Imaging and Information System Technologies”, suggests that in spite of early innovation in technologies supporting and transforming radiology practice, innovation in recent years has been relatively sparse. This lack of innovation has led to the commoditization of information and medical imaging technologies that support radiology. In the letter to the editor, Mr. Levin offers suggestions for how SIIM and the SIIM annual meeting can help get innovative products more quickly into the mainstream. He suggests some of the following:
- Promote various categories of innovation – use crowd sourcing to choose vendors to participate,
- Promote live product face-offs between vendors that want or are invited to participate,
- SIIM should provide basic HL7 and DICOM datasets to be used for testing or in face-offs,
- Provide technology areas dedicated to “extreme” use cases,
- Report and support innovative technologies on the SIIM website.
Both the original article and Brad Levin’s letter to the editor are published as freely available on the Springerlink JDI website. I encourage everyone to read the original article and the letter to the editor and comment on this blog. We are looking for suggestions for promoting new innovation for healthcare and imaging informatics.
Comments
Innovation Imperative
The valuable conversation started in the above mentioned paper by Reiner and McKinley, and continued by the insightful editorial by Brad Levin, warrant expansion and ongoing discussion. I encourage my industry colleagues to join this conversation and create the ground-swell of activity needed to initiate the change these industry leaders advocate.
As the U.S. healthcare system has become increasingly risk averse and consumed an increasing % of GDP, the use of unproven technology is often included as a contributing factor. While clinical imaging fights these battles with studies that validate the clinical value and appropriateness of imaging procedures, we must accelerate a similar approach with emerging radiology IT and imaging informatics solutions.
At the recent NYMIIS meeting in NYC, Dr. Eliot Siegel continued his rallying cry for disruptive PACS innovations seeking to break the drought our industry has struggled with over the past 5+ years. Organized Radiology must stand with Dr. Siegel and embrace the technology and social media mindset among younger radiologists who understand the power of IT to enable intelligent image and information sharing. Clinical and non-clinical Radiology experts must partner with practicing radiologists and administrators to identify and share data demonstrating measurable benefits of new technologies that provide valuable clinical information caregivers and patients need.
Organizations like SIIM, ACR, AHRA, ARRS and RSNA must increase and coordinate their efforts to provide a constructive Radiology framework that facilitates proven innovation and its’ adoption. As no single organization can solve the woes afflicting Radiology today, leaders in the vendor and provider communities should see these organizations as partners towards a common goal. As Dr. Paul Chang stated at the recent California Radiological Society annual meeting, “We are not going to survive as radiologists by merely reading films,” he said. “We must manage imaging.”
As the perceived value of primary care physicians has ebbed and flowed, Radiology’s perceived value is at serious risk unless we (societies, vendors and providers) work together to more vigorously develop and embrace newly proven information technologies that deliver operational efficiencies, improve the radiology revenue cycle and fundamentally benefit the quality of care we touch.
Here are links to the full-text articles covering the comments of Drs. Siegel and Chang;
http://www.auntminnie.com/index.aspx?sec=sup&sub=pac&pag=dis&ItemID=100540&wf=5094
http://www.auntminnie.com/index.aspx?sec=sup&sub=ris&pag=dis&ItemID=100514
Respectfully –
Dean Kaufman