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We hope you’ve gotten some good ideas from our earlier posts for places to eat and things to do. In our last installment, Chris offers a little advice on maximizing your time and comfort at the main event:
- Try catching the RSNA shuttle buses at the Lakeside Center, because the lines aren’t as long.
- If you’re just looking to find some good food and have a low-key evening, take a taxi north to the Lincoln Park neighborhood. It’s full of great restaurants… and you won’t have to wait all night to eat.
- Don’t bring your coat to the show (unless your company has private hospitality!). The coat check lines are long, and you’ll end up schlepping it around the show because the halls and buses are warm.
- Don’t wear the same shoes every day.
- Bring your own snacks; the lines in the food courts are long, and competition for seating is fierce. Or check out the RSNA Bistro– the food is better and and it’s much calmer.
Feel free to chime in with your own ideas and suggestions. We’ll see you soon!
Welcome back! This week, Chris offers suggestions for things to do in Chicago during RSNA when you have an evening out after the show:
- For first-timers to Chicago (or anyone who hasn’t done this): wait until it’s not raining, and then go to the observatory on the 100th floor of the John Hancock Center and have a drink.
- If you’re ready for some Chicago blues: take a taxi down to the Chicago Hilton and ask the concierge what’s playing tonight. The neighborhood behind the Hilton Towers is packed with blues clubs, including Buddy Guy’s and the Checkerboard.
- Go to Kitty O’Sheas. Most of the people who work here are actually from Ireland!
- Check out the bar at the Intercontinental Hotel. It’s good place to stop when you find yourself walking along Michigan Avenue, which you inevitably will at some point.
- Rush Street is where the nightlife is happening. This year’s hot places are probably already different from last year’s, so ask your cab driver to take you to the best bar on Rush St. He’ll know where to go.
Don’t forget to share with us any Chicago suggestions of your own. Look back next week for the final installment!
Today is the first of a series of posts, courtesy of Chris Wood, CEO of Clario. Chris has spent 22 years at RSNA and we’ll be dispensing a few pearls of his accumulated wisdom. This week, Chris shares with us some of his favorite places to eat and (beat the crowds!) in Chicago:
- Check out Lettuce Entertain You. This site is full of terrific restaurant recommendations.
- Go to Scoozi (found on Lettuce!) for their “comfortable Italian”. It’s mellowed out in the past few years, but the food is still just as good. I saw Madonna here once.
- Ed Debevic’s has great breakfast. The waitresses are rude and yell at you. It’s part of the charm. “If you like what you’re eatin’, order more. If you don’t, there’s the door.”
- If you’re looking to get some steak, don’t be seduced by the big-name independent houses. Check out the hotel-affiliated steakhouses (a favorite is the Saloon Steakhouse, located in the Seneca Hotel). I’ve never been able to spot a difference in quality.
- Shaw’s Crab House is a venerable favorite that boasts a fancy dining room, but what you really want to try is their laid-back Oyster Bar. They have seasonal fresh catches flown in every day from a different new location. Who knows—you might end up having shellfish harvested that morning from Clario’s home town!
Have some RSNA experience of your own? Feel free to share your own Chicago favorites with us in the comments, and check back every week for a new set of tips before the show!
Clario will be exhibiting at the Washington State Radiological Society Annual Meeting in Seattle on November 6th, at the World Trade Center in Seattle. We’re excited to show off zVision™ so close to home, and we’re also excited to bring a product that aligns so closely with some of the 2010 WSRS Meeting Objectives:
- Implement a protocol for communicating discrepancies between initial and final reads.
- Describe the best practice for ensuring that critical findings are communicated to the referring physician.
zVision’s results communication dashboard is ideal for communicating critical results and discrepancies at any point in the process. zVision offers a range of results communication abilities—everything from simple tracking to fully automated and closed-loop Critical Test Result Management (CTRM). You can customize your results communication to serve your practice policies and needs. zVision’s results communication tools also helps your sites meet JCAHO standards and achieve a more efficient workflow.
We invite all of the attendees of WSRS to stop by our booth on November 6th and say hello!
Clario is preparing for our first year exhibiting at RSNA at McCormick Place, Chicago from November 28th – December 3rd! We’ll be in Booth #1301, located in the Lakeside Center, Hall D. We’ll be on the 3rd floor, near the southeast entrance, with easy access to the Arie Crown Theater and panoramic terraces with stunning views of Lake Michigan.
In the next few weeks leading up to RSNA, we’ll be debuting our Tips and Tricks from an RSNA Veteran series. Chris Wood, CEO of Clario, with 22 years of RSNA attendance, will be sharing suggestions and recommendations for an enjoyable experience at the show and around town.
In the meantime, we hope you’re getting your tricks (and treats!) in this weekend. Happy Halloween!
Posted in RSNA
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Tagged halloween, rsna, zVision
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In today’s competitive environment, radiology practices need to be nimble and adaptive in order to efficiently serve new customers as the practice grows. Large private practice groups can provide superior service if they are able to fully exploit the advantages of having multiple subspecialists in one practice.
The Clario zVision system is the best software investment a growing private practice radiology group can make. Using zVision, our customers solve some of the most difficult integration and communication challenges in health care.
zVision is middleware; an incredibly flexible solution with the ability to launch or connect to any application you wish to use. We are PACS, dictation/VR, clinical application, and RIS- independent. We do not and will never limit the software applications that you may run or access. This is of particular importance to subspecialists, who may wish to use highly specialized software applications when they read.
Our unified worklist provides a powerful efficiency boost with the ability to view all your exams from all your sites in a single worklist. Our Master Patient Index (MPI) provides valuable time savings and convenience by allowing you to view all prior reports for your patient, even if they were scanned at multiple sites with different MRNs.
DICOM Routing streamlines your efficiency even more while reading for sites that do not have RI: when your sites send you today’s exam, zVision will create an order and fetch all relevant priors for that patient, freeing your referring site from having to manually send you all the priors.
These zVision tools, in addition to additional features, add up to significantly improved workflow and efficiency for your practice. Let us help you focus on what’s important.
Clario is currently installing a zVision system in a private practice radiology environment that reads for multiple hospitals and imaging centers. We are implementing a unified worklist for this customer, and as is normally the case, we are learning (in rather great detail) the workflow solutions that each of the hospitals and imaging centers has implemented in order to communicate with the radiologist and share information.
When PACS was first becoming popular, I had radiologists and technologists tell me that it would take forever for it to catch on. They would say, “We write on the envelopes and paper clip all sorts of information with the films; how will we do our job without film?” For quite a while, these cries were largely ignored by an industry that was focused on the technical challenges of displaying images in a way that competed with the efficiency of film. Over the years, most sites have devised solutions to the workflow issues generated by the replacement of film with digital images. But they still typically deal with a collection of disparate software packages that may (or may not) be designed to solve the issue at hand.
I am simultaneously struck by how much, and yet how little, things change. Yes, all of these sites have gone digital in a big way. They are all filmless and have been diligently improving their workflow in this digital world for several years. But when I look at the way these sites operate, it can often seem like their workflow solutions are still inferior to the time when film was the standard of care.
I urge you to ask yourself a few questions:
- Are you are using a PACS to exchange information that it was not designed to transmit?
- Are you unable to determine if someone received information related to an exam?
- Are you doing things like capturing images of reports and converting them to DICOM format, rending them unsearchable?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then it’s time to look at the next generation of radiology software. These middleware systems (like Clario’s zVision) allow all medical imaging stakeholders (referring doctors, technologists, radiologists, and administrators) to communicate effectively, while keeping all information as part of the secure history of the exam.
When working with our customer, we’ve found that we can improve these workflow and communication inefficiencies that private practice radiology groups are facing by implementing zVision as a middleware solution.
This is a place where we’ll share observations and ideas related to radiology software and IT. This is a time of incredible change and opportunity within the field of radiology. After a century of reading film, radiology has gone digital. The use of sophisticated IT is exploding. Nearly everyone is realizing – simultaneously – the tremendous potential the digital revolution can have on healthcare, and on radiology specifically.
The impact that we can make is enormous. With $100B spent annually on imaging services in the US, a few percentage points of efficiency translate into a significant dollar impact. And in addition, information technology as applied to radiology has the potential to not only increase efficiency but also to improve radiologist performance. Access to clinical information can result in richer and more meaningful reports. Decisions can be more “evidence-based” and quantitative.
At Clario, we are working to reinvent radiology from top to bottom. In this brave new world, referring physicians, radiologists, radiology assistants, technologists and administrators are seamlessly integrated and share a common database, with instant access to the information they need.
Information, however, is not enough. All stakeholders need to run their own software applications to effectively perform their function. Referring physicians need decision support. Technologists need information resources. Radiologists need sophisticated image processing and visualization. Administrators need advanced data analysis. All of these applications need access to practice and clinical data to run. Clario’s middleware solution and flagship product, zVision,is designed to do this.
At Clario, we build products to provide access to the tools and information you need, so you can focus on what’s important. Again, welcome to our blog. We welcome your contributions!
Posted in Clario
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Tagged clario, IT, radiology
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Welcome to Clario Medical Imaging’s blog. We’ll be updating regularly with press releases, relevant articles, company news, and more. Check back often! In the meantime, find more information on our company and products at www.clariomedical.com.
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