West Feliciana Hospital (WFH) has been serving patients in the small town of St. Francisville, Louisiana, since 1970, but its imaging capabilities were limited for a long time. As a result, the hospital gained a bit of a reputation among referring physicians in the area—when in doubt, they would just avoid WFH altogether and send patients more than 30 miles away to Baton Rouge.

If you’re going to operate a hospital outpatient imaging facility so distant to the nearest city that your location overlooks a sprawling cow pasture, you need to give patients a reason to make the drive. OGH Imaging in Grand Coteau, LA.—population 939—has been doing just that ever since opening its doors in 2005. 

Six years ago, the non-invasive cardiovascular lab (NICL) at 540-bed St. Dominic Hospital in Jackson, Mississippi, faced something of an uncertain future. The rules for maintaining accreditation, set by intersocietal accreditation commissions, require that all vascular exams get interpreted within 48 hours of image acquisition. For cardiac exams, the read must wait no longer than 24 hours.

West Feliciana Hospital (WFH) has been serving patients in the small town of St. Francisville, Louisiana, since 1970, but its imaging capabilities were limited for a long time. As a result, the hospital gained a bit of a reputation among referring physicians in the area—when in doubt, they would just avoid WFH altogether and send patients more than 30 miles away to Baton Rouge.

When it comes to ensuring patients receive the best possible imaging experience, Star Valley Medical Center in Afton, Wyo. went the extra mile so that patients don’t have to.

Imagine trying to find a white rabbit in a field of snow. This scenario is similar to what radiologists go through when looking for tumors in a woman with dense breasts, as both normal fibroglandular tissue and abnormal masses appear white on a mammogram.

In the MRI suite at St. Joseph’s Candler Hospital in Savannah, Ga., the numbers add up to a quantifiable success story.

If risk-sharing contracts between healthcare providers and their suppliers pan out as the next big thing in the business of healthcare, Hitachi Medical Systems will have bragging rights as an early adopter.