From the May 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


DMBN: So it was a natural fit for you to work with SIIM with that being your background.

Krupinski: Exactly. Years ago, I was invited to participate on a panel at one of the meetings. I was asked to talk about how display of information affects the interpretation of that information.


DMBN: How long have you been a member of the society and what compelled you to take a leadership role?

Krupinski: I’ve been with SIIM since 1995 and as for my leadership role, I saw a need within the society for a perspective most people don’t have. Many of our members are radiologists, PACS administrators and technologically oriented people. But I can count on two hands the number of people that do what I do. So, I volunteered for various committees and certain short courses at the meeting and so on. The more I did, the more opportunities emerged. It just ended up at one point that I was asked to take on a larger leadership role.

DMBN: What are your goals as chair for the society?

Krupinski: I have two major goals. The first deals with the electronic health record initiative. In an ideal world, all the different systems would talk to each other and information would be communicated from one system to another. But the initial mandates did not include imaging or images. In a sense, how can you have an electronic patient record without images? How on earth is it going to be incorporated if nobody is thinking about it?

So that’s the first part, to work with some federal agencies to find out what it would take to get images into the program at an earlier stage. I think SIIM is ideally poised to do that because that’s imaging informatics — our field.
My second goal is to spread the word about imaging informatics in general and to bring in a new generation of people into the society and into imaging informatics in general. We’d like to attract radiology residents, pathology residents — people dealing with images on a daily basis. But we’re also looking at the engineers, the Ph.D.s, more people from my field too, to get involved, do research projects and spread the word to the scientific community.

DMBN: And your conference is coming up. Is there anything you’re particularly excited about?

Krupinski: The whole meeting is exciting to me. It’s exciting because of the combination of purely educational tracks and scientific tracks. It’s possible to go from one session where you’re learning something practical and hands on to another presenting state-of-the-art research about what’s going on in the field.

One thing we introduced last year that received a great response was — if you remember Lucy from the Peanuts comics with her little “the doctor is in” psychiatry booth — we have a little booth staged in half-hour intervals by experts in the field. Attendees can come up to them with problems they’re encountering at their hospital and find solutions.

May 2011 Magazine

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