HealthData Management - November 2012

editor’s

NOTE

The Genie’s Out, Are You Paying Attention?

These Things i know: medical imaging advances have saved countless lives, and the imaging industry has a track record of relentless innovation; the foundation of medical imaging and its lifesaving capabilities is radiation, the scariest and most misunderstood energy mankind has learned to unleash and tried to harness; the health care industry has a lot to answer for, for its half-hearted attempts to understand and minimize the dangers of radiation exposure.

The imaging industry finds itself in a tough spot right now. it’s in a financial hurt as the number of imaging studies continues to drop (see the feature on page 26) and it’s under public fire because of mass media attention on radiation exposure and concerns that some treatments are worse than the disease.

The latter shouldn’t come as a surprise. The fact that imaging studies require lead vests and bunkered technicians means the dangers are not lost on patients, who are all too open to the idea that the dangers of medical imaging—along with smartphones, microwave ovens, et. al.—are being kept under lock and key by the secret cabals who are really running the show.

But as this month’s cover story (page
20) notes, the imaging industry itself has
reached no consensus on what constitutes
radiation overexposure, or how serious the
problem is. But it seems everyone can agree
that the imaging profession and the overall
health care industry does a really lousy job of
tracking long-term radiation exposure, and
haven’t really made much of an effort even
as the use of c T scans and their large doses
of ionizing radiation have become the tool
of choice for diagnosing many conditions.
i’ve reported on this industry for more than
a decade, and i’ve come to understand the
systemic causes of its clini-
cal and financial missteps—
a litigious environment
that has spawned defensive
medicine, misaligned finan-
cial incentives that encour-
aged more treatment when
less was optimal, a lack of
clear communication stan-
dards among them.
But the lack of industry intelligence
around how, when and why to expose pa-
tients to imaging exams is really hard to
comprehend. worse, as Richard morin, a
medical physicist at mayo clinic Jackson-
ville notes in the cover, the industry is years
away from understanding the effects of cur-
rent imaging practices. and i. T. tools to track
cumulative radiation exposure and share
that with the right caregivers hasn’t been
universally adopted—except in california,
which passed a law requiring them.
The Radiological society of north amer-
ica is showing off the industry’s wares in
chicago this month. i’ll get first-hand looks
at absolutely bedazzling technologies—the
latest 3-d imaging systems, portable X-ray
devices, mRi microscopy, you name it. But
i’ll have to ask myself whether we are re-
sponsible enough to use them wisely.

Greg Gillespie Editor-in-Chief

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Greg Gillespie greg.gillespie@sourcemedia.com (312) 777-1370

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