Q&A with KLAS VP of Imaging Informatics & Oncology Monique Rasband: Partnering Key to Making Enterprise Imaging Strides

For the better part of a decade – from 2010 to 2020 – CIOs were busy implementing and optimizing their EMRs. And since 2020, it’s been all about cost cutting via application rationalization, integration and, of course, security. But there’s another massive challenge that stands to benefit from CIO leadership – the journey from a siloed, ology-specific imaging paradigm towards one focused on more seamless sharing across the enterprise. Of course, the topic is nothing new to KLAS’s Monique Rasband, who has been with the company for 15 years and focused on enterprise imaging for much of that time. In this interview with healthsystemCIO Founder & Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra, Rasband discusses the value of enterprise imaging, how to get started, and the most effective role for CIOs in the journey.



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Bold Statements

What’s nice about the VNA, if people do decide to go that route, is that a strong VNA will be able to handle multiple PACS, so you get them in one place. They can handle the scopes. They can handle the non-DICOM. So for a lot of people, the reason they like having the VNA is all of the different pieces are able to fit in one solution.

The CIO, what is going to be so critical and important to them is going to be security. And figuring out: are these pieces of equipment; are these machines secure? And very unfortunately, the WannaCry virus was brought in from a modality.

… this is a partnership, not only with the CIO, but with the clinical side, IT, and then, of course, the vendor. If there is not that partnership and people are not all in, one of those teams can’t jump out by themselves and have it be successful.

Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemCIOs interview with Monique Rasband, VP of Imaging Informatics and Oncology with KLAS. I’m Anthony Guerra, founder and editor-in-chief. Monique, thanks for joining me.

Monique: Hi, thank you so much for having me today. I really appreciate it.

Anthony: Excellent, Monique. So we’re going to have a lot of fun today, and we’re going to talk about enterprise imaging, which is one of your specialties, so I’m pretty excited about that. Let’s start off with my usual question. Tell me about your organization and your role.

Monique: I am vice president of our imaging team, imaging informatics, and that does include oncology. Cardiology also falls under my umbrella and then cloud as it’s involved in imaging and then of course, AI. And you said, we’re going to have fun, this is obviously one of my passions, a really fun topic, and it’s fun for KLAS to get to dive into it.

So a bit about KLAS for those that are not familiar. We get all of our data from the healthcare providers. We are on the phone, the good old-fashioned way, or on Teams and we’re having these in-person interviews talking with them about strategy. We get into the solutions, support all of the fun pieces that feed up into the enterprise.

Enterprise imaging is interesting in that it is a bit unique and different case by case. For some organizations, having a PACS and reading for multiple hospitals or other organizations, that is at their enterprise level. We look at others, some of the academics, some of the IDNs, and they may be looking at multiple specialties under the umbrella for enterprise imaging and just within their organization. So we do find the pieces of enterprise imaging and the definition is different case by case, depending on what they need.