The opioid epidemic continues to make headlines as it takes lives across the country. One radiologists sees how the industry can do more to engage patients in this vulnerable population.

Despite attracting less than two percent of NIH grants for medical research, radiology may hold a large chunk of medicine’s future in its hands. And the most mind-boggling advances may come from the modality most picked on for being too pricey.

Should a radiologist be a direct communicator to patients? Should they help physicians diagnose and manage patients? Or can they do both?

HealthImaging sat down with RSNA President Richard Ehman, MD, to talk about RSNA 2017 and reinventing radiology. 

Two years ago a Duke University radiology professor filed an antitrust lawsuit against her employer, accusing Duke of colluding with the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to thwart either school’s faculty members who might seek to move laterally between the two institutions. Danielle Seaman, MD, said she’d been locked out of a position she desired at UNC-CH by such an arrangement.

Anthem’s recent decision to no longer pay for outpatient CT and MR exams performed in hospitals didn’t come from nowhere—and, going forward, the move is not likely to be an outlier among private payers’ business stratagems.

MEDNAX has acquired Hartford–based Jefferson Radiology and Jefferson Imaging Associates as part of MEDNAX’s vRad—a global teleradiology company with over 500 U.S. board-certified radiologists.

Offering first-year medical students an elective introduction to interventional radiology (IR), researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and its Perelman School of Medicine have found considerable receptivity to the learning opportunity and heightened interest in the specialty.