by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | May 25, 2018
From the May 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
HCB News: What initiatives are you planning to focus on during your time as SIIM Chair?
JW: There are two technological phenomena that are driving our industry right now. They would be machine learning and enterprise imaging.
For many years, maybe from 2009 to 2016, imaging informatics was relatively quiet, after the 2000s, we saw two things. The great recession and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act really brought a singular focus on implementing EHR in the U.S. That really meant that almost all of the Healthcare IT focus was on EHR, and I think imaging informatics was kind of dormant. We’ve seen it come roaring back. It’s critical that SIIM stays at the forefront of AI and enterprise imaging. We need to continue to exchange ideas and implement them.
HCB News: One of your recent blogs touted the big increase in interest surrounding enterprise imaging. Where is healthcare at in regard to EI? Is it generally just the “interest” stage, or is there exploration, adoption?
JW: I think we’re still in the early phase. You have organizations like Cleveland Clinic or Duke who are clearly early adopters. But for many of us, imaging informatics in our space, locally, is still very much radiology and maybe cardiology. So there’s a big delta between where some of the leading organizations are and the rest of the market. Though we think it’s a great opportunity for SIIM to provide a very practical education for people, so that they’re ready for when they start adopting these new methodologies.
HCB News: What work needs to be done in EI to advance it? Is it work by vendors, by healthcare organizations, insurers? Physicians?
JW: Probably the biggest thing is for the space as a whole to decide if there are going to be tiny fragments of informatics within multiple specialties, or can we create an inclusive community where each image-producing specialty is welcome. If we can do that, I think enterprise imaging will grow.
HCB News: What are the top challenges for SIIM members today?
JW: Many of our members have to bridge two different spaces. They may have started in radiology and subsequently entered the enterprise IT space. And the people of their former department see them as part of the larger formal enterprise, and the people in the enterprise might not see them as true IT professionals.
HCB News: Can you tell us about the Diagnostic Imaging Adoption Model (DIAM)?
JW: Several years ago, HIMSS and SIIM began working together on the space of enterprise imaging, and they created the HIMSS/SIIM enterprise community. Out of that organization, about a year and a half ago, we started working on an imaging informatics adoption model. Unbeknownst to us, the European Society of Radiology and HIMSS Europe had started working on a similar model. So we had two adoption models across the globe. Over the past year, we’ve been able to merge that into a single maturity model. There will be a radiology imaging flavor and imaging informatics flavor. It will define, for the first time, different levels of maturity, about what it means for an organization to adopt enterprise imaging.
