Traditional operating rooms with imaging systems, high-tech displays and other systems being wheeled in and out is a thing of the past. The recent move towards streamlining ORs has made physicians, architects and device manufacturers rethink the conventional OR and find innovative ways to integrate equipment-especially imaging hardware—into their ORs at the point of care.

Cloud computing technology—a market that Merrill Lynch values at $95 billion over the next five years—has recently begun to move  into healthcare. However, questions remain about how facilities and departments, including radiology, will fully take advantage of these zero footprint solutions.

As the economy has soured and facilities investigate new ways to cut costs, many have turned to outsourcing their radiology needs via remote reading services. Able to provide expert remote reads and reports, teleradiology can cut the costs linked to staffing in-house radiologists during overnight, weekend or off-hours when patient volume is often slim. Yet, cost efficiency should never trump quality of patient care, and newer services do not require that trade-off.

Implementing a RIS/PACS presents an imaging center with major changes to operations, workflow and practice. Physicians and administrators can realize enormous benefits from the introduction of the technology, provided the A, B, Cs of their master plan includes a D for proper deployment.

In the current era of healthcare reform, spawned by the funding made available in the HITECH Act of February's stimulus package, there has been much discussion about producing transparent and quantifiable data on the performance of various departments.

For a number of leading-edge enterprises, image management across multiple ologies is the logical next step in the ongoing image management process. Integrating image-intense ologies such as cardiology, pathology and orthopedics into the radiology image management solution can deliver a number of advantages. Facilities and health systems working toward the vision of a unified platform anticipate benefits on all fronts: clinical, operational and economic.

Building bridges between imaging and other image- and report-dependent departments is the focus of the annual meeting of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) that rolls into Charlotte, N.C., from June 4 to 7.

For cardiology PACS, the explosion of cardiac-related advances across imaging modalities has created demand for expanded capabilities beyond simple image storage and distribution, providing physicians with access to patient-specific information related to images and reports within the facility or externally. Meanwhile, with this increased volume of image data, cardiologists also need to have access to more extensive patient data, such as hemodynamic monitoring, EKG and electronic medical record (EMR) information to create structured reports.