Awhile back I wrote a few notes entitled "Stethoscopes, EMRs and EHRs - what is all the data worth?"
They were essentially musings about my own experiences with health records, patient data and some thoughts dealing with "evidence-based medicine" from some experiences I had the time.
Recently I had the opportunity to meet several of the over 120 radiologists at my institution. I asked about a dozen of them about the "merger of radiology and pathology services" I have been hearing and reading about in pathology for some time;
See - 10 reasons for radiology-pathology merger, "In diagnosis, a tale of two specialties" and Why Pathology should not merge with Radiology
With the exception of a few radiologists such as Dr. Li at MD Anderson in the above CAP Today article, it is hard to find any radiologists who have heard of this or have any thoughts on the matter.
It is not entirely clear to me if this will happen or what it will look like, I think there are convincing reasons both for and against why it should or will happen. Nonetheless, it appears to be largely driven by pathology with either little interest or thought from radiology.
I haven't thought about business models for "diagnostic medicine", "molecular radiology", or "radiologic pathology" yet but gather there would be room for both specialties in such a field. And perhaps if and when the radiology community looks at this, the cost-benefits of doing so will determine to what, if any extent this happens.
Dark Daily had a piece on this as well.
One thing is certain - the next real department of diagnostic medicine beyond Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital on Fox will likely not look like this one.
