The ECRI Institute is a US-based, independent, non-profit organisation that researches the best approaches to improving the safety, quality and cost-effectiveness of patient care. ECRI Institute experts have compiled a Top 10 list of important technologies and technology-related issues that hospital and health system leaders should pay close attention to this year. The list takes into account the convergence of critical economic, patient safety, reimbursement, and regulatory pressures. The effort began with an open call for nominations throughout the ECRI Institute. This resulted in a nominated list of more than 30 technologies and related issues. The list was then circulated among key ECRI Institute thought leaders who individually ranked their Top 10 choices. Once all rankings were compiled, the top 5 technologies emerged fairly quickly. A number of technologies competed for rankings 6 to 10, so a ratings consensus panel was convened to reach agreement on the final Top 10.

For the benefits of its readers in healthcare communities outside the USA, International Hospital presents the essence of the ECRI Top10 watch list in a series of three articles to be published in consecutive issues of the magazine. In this first article, we take a look at the three imaging technologies ranking number 3, 4 and 8 in the Top 10

Number 3. Digital Breast Tomosynthesis
Adoption of full-field digital mammography since it became commercially available in the United States in 2000 has been slow because of controversies that included costs, data storage needs, disagreement about risks and benefits of screening by age group, and trade-offs between how to reduce false positives without increasing false negatives. As of July 2011, 22% of mammography facilities still operated film-based mammography.

Enter the new twist on full-field digital mammography

Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) must lose its status as a dedicated application that is primarily controlled by the radiology department. PACS projects will increasingly require a strategic vision by IT and hospital management. This article focuses on ‘consolidation’ both in the technological infrastructure and at application level.

by Erwin Bellon, Jan Demey, Tom Deprez, Willem Van Damme, Michel Feron, Reinoud Reynders and Bart Van den Bosch

About a decade ago, digitally acquired images on workstations replaced light boxes with diagnostic film mounted on them. These impressive workstations are merely the visible part of the PACS which has to manage, present and distribute billions of images. Due to its special technological requirements, a PACS was often viewed as a separate system for radiology, on dedicated servers with dedicated storage, maybe even managed by the radiology department. With today