Virtual Radiologic (vRad), a technology-enabled national radiology practice and the world's largest telemedicine company, announced today that Shannon M. Werb has joined as its Chief Information Officer. As CIO, Werb will oversee all of vRad's IT operations, and will additionally work with vRad's hospital and radiology group clients to develop innovative ways to leverage data and technology to improve patient care and operational efficiency in an era of outcomes-driven healthcare.

Getting images via health information exchange represents a unique technical challenge—and opportunity for collaboration. Watch the video.

After an intensive evaluation of seven PACS suppliers, Joseph Brant Hospital (Burlington, Ontario) ordered a CARESTREAM Vue PACS and zero-footprint Vue Motion mobile image viewer to provide fully featured on-site and off-site reading and viewing of images and reports by radiologists, clinicians and referring physicians.

INFINITT North America, a leading provider of image and information management technologies for healthcare, announced today that they have signed a ten-year agreement with the National Football League (NFL) to provide on-demand access to players’ medical images.

Rochelle Community Hospital (Rochelle, Ill.) purchased and installed Carestream’s Vue Cardio PACS that provides fully featured viewing and management for its echo cardiograms and nuclear cardiology exams. This versatile system will also support ECGs and other types of cardiac exams that the critical access hospital may add in the future.

DICOM Grid, a leading provider of cloud-based medical image exchange solutions, has been awarded a grant to bring image sharing capabilities to the Massachusetts Health Information Exchange (HIway).  The grant, awarded to DICOM Grid by the Massachusetts eHealth Institute at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MeHI), will fund the development of a standards-based interface that can be used by providers to access and exchange images over the Mass HIE.

Merge Healthcare Incorporated (Nasdaq:MRGE), a leading provider of clinical systems and innovations that seek to transform healthcare, today announced that its Board of Directors has accepted the resignation of Michael W. Ferro, Jr. as Chairman and a Director of the Company and appointed Dennis Brown as the Company's new Chairman, both effective immediately.

The era of “big data” is upon us, and the challenge for healthcare will be to make sense of all the information being collected. The average hospital will have 450 terabytes of patient data by 2015, with much of that volume consisting of medical imaging.