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Reading stacks of films, as well as battling alternators and tape recorders, is but a distant memory to most radiologists. Instead, we are all challenged by voice recognition, application interfaces, managing PACS infrastructure, and connecting all of these tools in an ever more complex universe of IT systems in our professional environments. Radiologists, referring clinicians, and patients have grown accustomed to the incredible efficiencies that have resulted from incremental use of these technologies in our practices. Clinical office visits to discuss the results of an examination within an hour of an elective imaging test are the new normal in many places. Teleradiology has enabled many practices to deliver near real-time interpretations and consultations to support the contemporaneous clinical decision making that is expected today. Administrations often demand quality and productivity metrics from imaging practices. As a result of all these trends, radiologists have become completely dependent on IT. Because there has been no formal informatics training in most radiology residencies, solid knowledge of the many intertwined subspecialty areas of imaging IT is hard to come by, and practice leaders are often in the position to make important and long-range purchase decisions for critical practice infrastructure with little guidance. Some are blessed with talented radiology IT managers, while others have to rely on hospital IT staff members who are even more removed from the imaging domain. When we examined the body of ACR guidelines for corresponding IT content, we found a total of 8 guidelines that either were dedicated to imaging IT or at least contained some IT content. Unfortunately, this content was not widely dispersed and, by our estimation, not readily consumable by the average practicing radiologist. Thus, the idea was born to create a more comprehensive body of work, an ACR Imaging IT Reference Guide, which is written for the practicing radiologist and publishedin this specialissueofJACR.Itprovidesawealth of knowledge useful in daily practice and for long-range planning. We would like to acknowledge the wise counsel and encouragement provided by Drs Paul Chang and Khan Siddiqui during the formative stage of this project and the invaluable support of ACR staff members Margaret Tsai and Raina Keefer for the many editorial tasks required to make this project reality. It should be explicitly mentioned that the creation of this reference guide would not have been possible without the generous contribution of valuable time and considerable knowledge from our outstanding writing team of many experts in the field, who provided 12 rich manuscripts for inclusion in thisspecialissueandtowhomwearetrulyindebted.Given the fluidandrapidlyevolvingnatureofthesubject,weplan to maintain this compendium of work on a dedicated online portal. This format will facilitate future updates to the content as appropriate, and we invite readers to visit back frequently. Ourjourneythroughthisreferenceguidebeginswithan article by McGinty etal[1]relatingthenewACR Imaging 3.0� framework of value-based delivery of integrated imaging care to the requisite IT underpinning that enables it. This piece references many of the later contributions in this guide and communicates the transformational power of technology in support of the overarching strategic goal. Modern imaging practices can create a sustainable |
