Q&A with David S. Channin MD: How to Make PACS Patient Centered

As healthcare takes steps toward the Affordable Care Act’s mandate for patient centricity, information technology also has some ground to traverse. Take PACS, for instance. Technology developed as a departmental workflow tool must transition to a system that contributes to a holistic view of a specific patient rather than supporting the interpretation of a specific study. Access to the data that radiology generates must be enhanced for everyone, including patients.

As a former chair of radiology; one-time National Institutes of Health investigator with the Annotation and Image Markup Project; and a computer programmer, David S. Channin, MD, has as intimate an understanding of the capabilities and shortcomings of imaging informatics as anyone. Now president of the recently launched health IT consulting firm Insightful Medical Informatics, Channin addressed the above question, as well as the important roles that vendors, IHE and the federal government all have to play as this system continues to evolve. <Read More>