From the January/February 2012 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


“There’s been a lot of consolidation in outpatient imaging, where centers have either partnered with hospitals or partnered with other outpatient imaging centers to roll up into some of the larger chains,” says Julie Pekarek, vice president of solutions management for Merge Healthcare.

“PACS is more and more becoming a multi-facility system,” says Mark Bronkalla, vice president of radiology and enterprise solutions for Merge Healthcare. “We’ve got customers that run literally dozens of hospitals off of a single PACS.”


As a result of the ongoing consolidation, it’s going to become increasingly important for systems to be able to handle more and more exams as time goes by.

Challenges in the sector

Across the board, one of the major challenges in the sector has been the questions posed by federal regulations, such as meaningful use, and how they will impact the PACS, RIS and HIS sector.

“I think everyone is still looking at the looming regulations and rules that are expected around meaningful use,” says Banks.

Another hardship, according to Solano, is reimbursement cuts. If imaging facilities receive less reimbursement, they will obviously have less money to spend on health care IT solutions. “For those facilities that don’t have the funding or an IT department to manage a new PACS solution, there is the pay-per-study model that allows groups to have a full featured PACS without the high upfront cost of purchasing a solution,” she says.

Jennings says that a major challenge for his company has
been trying to convince customers that it’s OK to use the cloud. “Some parts of health care, I think are really getting it, that there are cost advantages, there are scalability advantages and it’s as secure as anything in the four walls of a hospital,” he says. “There are other parts of health care that I think are still coming to grips with the idea that their information is actually going to leave the hospital and ride out across secure Internet to a data center somewhere else.”

More meaningful use and mobility to come

Moving forward, it seems inevitable that RIS will eventually need to meet meaningful use requirements to stay relevant.

January/February 2012 Magazine

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