Q&A with Duke University Health System Vice Chairman of Radiology, IT, & Clinical Informatics Christopher Roth, MD: “Enterprise Imaging Has Part to Play in Addressing Shrinking Margins”

In a perfect world, the only thing imaging professionals would have to consider is how to improve clinician workflow and thus, satisfaction, along with patient safety. Of course, the world is far from perfect, as demonstrated by healthcare’s shrinking margins. So those professionals must do their part to keep the enterprise as robust as possible. When it comes to imaging, Duke’s Dr. Christopher Roth talks about increasing good dollars in and decreasing bad dollars out. On the good side, he cites efforts to improve patient scheduling and, thus, throughput; while on the bad side he talks about ways to decrease storage costs and reduce application expenditures by consolidating vendors. In this interview with healthsystemCIO Founder & Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra, Roth covers these issues, point of care ultrasound considerations and many others.



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Bold Statements

… it’s a really big space, and it’s really hard to do everything well. So any organization is going to have to prioritize what they choose to do well.

… there’s a lot of opportunity out there, a lot of interest out there, a lot of shiny things that are appealing to our physicians that we want to be able to really look hard at and say, ‘What’s going to work? What matters to us? What is it we want to pay the most attention to, and what’s going to deliver the most return on the human time and dollars that we want to deploy?’

It’s a core issue and it’s been around for a long time, and it’s certainly something that floats up to the CMIO or CIO level that, ‘Hey, it’s taking me a really long time to do my job. I’m tired. I’m not feeling like I want to be part of this organization if you’re not going to support me.’ And that becomes a recruiting and retention-type issue, and it’s hard to find good clinicians these days. 

Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s interview with Dr. Christopher Roth, Associate Chief Medical Officer for the Imaging Service Line and Professor of Radiology at Duke Health; and Vice Chairman of Radiology, IT, and Clinical Informatics with Duke University Health System. I’m Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. Dr. Roth, thanks for joining me.

Dr. Roth: Thank you, Anthony.

Anthony: All right, great. So we’re going to have a fun chat today. Let’s start off by telling me a little bit about your organization or organizations and your role.

Dr. Roth: Sure, thanks. I have been a neuroradiologist for 15 years at Duke. I transitioned into IT around 2011 and I’ve been progressively doing more and more around the organization within radiology and beyond. The beyond part is a little bit interesting because the perception of radiologists that they’re stuck in a room and they don’t really go too far outside of that, I think that’s growing increasingly uncommon. In particular, because many of the imaging technologies that we use are very similar in some ways to some of the other things that are happening elsewhere in the system. And we have some best practices, some good ideas that we can share with all of those places around the health system that really haven’t had the decades of experience that we have.

So part of what my job has evolved into, both as the vice chair of radiology for my department and also leading the imaging service line, which is the group of imaging specialties, when it comes to considering both the technology but also the quality and safety and capital requirements, people, access, growth,