U.S. healthcare is in for a wave of technology-driven disruption over the next five years unlike any it’s seen up to now—and it’s up to imaging professionals to light the way in figuring out what to embrace, what to reject and what to take a chance on.

If that sounds like so much motivational rah-rah from a radiology insider, think again. It’s the perspective of an influential healthcare administrator whose current specialty happens to be surgery.

“Ever since I started my career, radiology always had the most interesting tools,” recalls Leslie Jebson, who’s worked in healthcare administration for more than 20 years and today manages all surgical specialties for SIU Medicine in Springfield, Ill. Nor is he just talking about advanced imaging modalities, PACS and such. “I remember the radiology people were the first to use Apple Newtons. They were the first have a smartphones. They have always seemed to be the organizational leaders in technology.”

He’s not done yet.

“I would submit to you,” Jebson says, “that the field of radiology has been more disruptive to healthcare than anything else, including pharmaceuticals.”

Jebson offered his thoughts during a phone interview that focused on the material he’ll present at the annual meeting of AHRA, the Association for Medical Imaging Management, in Anaheim next month. His 90-minute session, “Technologies That Will Disrupt Imaging and Healthcare Within 5 Years,” is scheduled for Sunday, July 9, at 2:30.

“What is disruption?” Jebson asks, not just rhetorically. “How do we define it? When should we embrace it? How do we position ourselves so it doesn’t catch us off guard? Remember the Polaroid camera. It went extinct because it failed to evolve.”

The future is already upon you

Of course, one of the prime drivers of technology decision-making is money—a finite if flexible resource. “The new paradigm for imaging services is to be both a revenue generator and a cost center, and that can be very tricky,” Jebson says. “Administrators must leverage data intelligence that is bolted onto the electronic health record systems.” Some, he adds, will have to get creative with, for example, “the logistics of scheduling individual patients versus population health patients or postoperative care patients.”

As for imaging technology advances, he sees ultrasound and fluoroscopy devices shrinking to the size of handhelds, for example, as well as prostheses 3D-printed by in-house teams jointly led by radiology and orthopedics.

If the latter seems farfetched, Jebson says, consider that the Europeans are developing 3D-printed casting now. “You could cast a patient on demand,” he says. “The cast is waterproof, you don’t have multiple visits, and you can tighten the cast and adjust it on your smartphone. If it really works, think about what this is going to do to the casting industry.”

Not to mention to healthcare-provider organizations.

“Do you want to sit and wait for that to happen, imaging professional, or do you want to get out in front of it, talk to orthopedics and figure out what your role is going to be?”

Margins for error?

Depending on the lifecycle price tag of any particular disruptive technology coming down the pike, some innovations may fall into a gray area—pricey, promising and unproven in clinical practice. Asked if there may be times when it will make sense for a provider organization to take a chance on something whose ROI isn’t entirely certain, Jebson pauses a moment.

“I don’t think we do enough trial and error,” he says. “We don’t do enough to have really open and honest dialogue about the things we put in that were game-changers versus the ones we thought would be game-changers and turned out to be duds. How do we learn from that? There’s always a balancing act to perform.”

Technology-assessment committees and tools will continue to play key roles in successfully sustaining such balance, Jebson says, and the potential downstream implications of each technology acquisition will continue to loom large over all deliberations.

“If your interventional radiologists introduce a new procedure with an innovative device that disrupts the traditional surgical modality, how do we best get out in front of that both operationally and politically?” Jebson says, hinting at potential turf battles to come. “When it comes to innovation in healthcare, it will take a great deal of foresight to be successful in the future. You can either sit at the healthcare table or you can be on the menu.”