Addressing Health Disparities and Promoting Equity: The Role of Advanced Imaging Solutions

Featuring Jordan Bazinsky, CEO, Intelerad 

Hi, my name is Jordan Bazinsky. I have the privilege of serving as CEO of Intelerad. We are a medical imaging software company that focuses on distributing across the world really interesting technologies that serve radiologists. I spent the last 25 years in health care technology, working across both payers and providers, and supported some of the biggest needs out there for how we deliver health care. 

What do you consider to be the greatest challenges to providing care in the medical imaging industry today? 

Much like the rest of the health care system, medical imaging suffers from the challenge of shortage of clinicians and burnout of clinicians. And so when you look across physicians, nurses, technologists, we are consistently seeing a shortage of what we need versus what we have. And for those who are in the roles today, [we are] continually hearing about burnout, lack of work life balance, trouble keeping up with the sheer volume of work they have ahead of them. And so within the medical imaging space, that really rings true. And oftentimes we find ourselves confronting that very head-on with our clients to help them figure out how to navigate the reality of clinician shortage and burnout. 

And many of the technologies we can bring to bear, AI being a great example of this, helps alleviate that challenge because it streamlines and optimizes the workflows. We can reduce the length of time that it takes for things like studies. We can reduce diagnostic errors. We can prioritize the critical studies. And frankly, we're facilitating faster decision making.

And so if you think about the work that Intelerad does by way of the example, we can prioritize the integration of advanced analytics and AI capabilities that help the providers get insights faster from medical images. And in the process, we'll gain scalability and interoperability to ensure that all of the different tools at their fingertips are working in concert towards very quickly getting to inaccurate diagnosis. That can help really bridge the gap of how many people are available to do the work that the health care system requires, while at the same time making life and the day-to-day work of a clinician a lot more meaningful and really free up more time to spend with patients in that diagnostic work, as opposed to thinking about all of the ancillary pieces of the job that they're having to attend to.

How can AI and emerging technologies enhance medical imaging and improve patient care in a rapidly evolving industry? 

It is really exciting to think about where medical imaging sits within the overall ecosystem. A decade ago, one might not have said that. Things have been going along for quite some time at a reasonably status-quo pace within imaging. And then in rapid succession, we saw the uptake of cloud technologies, the adoption of artificial intelligence technologies, that is all happening against the backdrop of clinician shortages, a strong push to provide greater diagnostics across a broader range of disease states. And so we're now in a position where if you're interested in AI, cloud, democratization of health care, this is the best place to be right now in the health care system. 

So, when I think about the cloud, we can scale up or down depending on changing needs. You get dynamic compute, dynamic storage, you get the ability to push more intricate security parameters, you're bringing data physically closer to global communities, depending on where they sit via the cloud, the public cloud. We are able to then do more with the actual underlying data itself by bringing it in and out of more systems and making it more readily available at the point of care. So if you think about someone, for example, who's coming into the cancer diagnosis, the oncologist or the radiologist that is working in concert with that oncologist can more rapidly see all of the prior studies that will indicate where are we are today relative to where we were. Is that tumor growing Is it shrinking? Have others emerged relative to what we saw in the past? And the rate of change and the availability of the technologies to power these things has been so dramatic over these last few years, that it's really exciting to see not only where we've come from, but more importantly, where are we heading. And AI and cloud in particular are the things that are improving patient care by democratizing access, by reducing the costs to deliver this care, by making it more readily available at faster rates. And again, essentially being the technological extender of clinicians who don't have enough hours in the day to take care of all the patients in need. So we're seeing a lot of really positive externalities at play by virtue of these new technologies coming in line and being rapidly adopted out in the field. 

What are some of the key trends and challenges you see within the medical imaging industry in the coming years? What can providers do to stay ahead of the curve? 

We certainly continue to see AI, cloud-based solutions as the future of medical imaging. We're focused on efforts to provide a comprehensive imaging platform of very high quality to take advantage of those technologies because we believe that by harnessing their power, we make tremendous improvements to improving diagnostic accuracy, staff efficiency, and personalized patient care. Also, when we think about health and equity, it's still a major challenge in health care. Medical imaging has a very unique role in mitigating that, partly because we are at the front lines of diagnostics.

So as I mentioned, when you look across the globe and half the world's population doesn't even have access to imaging, the ability to put these types of tools in the hands of clinicians unlocks a world of additional value and potential health care to people who previously never would have had access to it. Now, we're very lucky. I'm at Intelerad and we have some wonderful partners who are focused squarely on improving accessibility and improving equity in the health care system. So RadEqual is one of them that we're very fortunate to be able to support. Their nonprofit promotes opportunities in radiology and informatics for women. And they also push for global access to medical imaging. 

And so it's through organizations like that as well as our ability to work with hundreds of phenomenal organizations at the core of their information technology needs and thousands around the globe that are touching medical images in some form or fashion and pass those around the world. Through that work we really  have an ability in our own way to support some of these unique challenges around where and how people get access to care. So for me, I continually come back to equity in health care, I come back to accessibility, come back to the accuracy of the clinical diagnosis and the clinician experience. And if we're able to solve for all of those different levers that ultimately created our health care system. And it becomes a much better experience for you, for me, for our families and communities. And that’s something we can all be really proud of at the end of the day. 

It’s very easy to be scared of technology. We’ve lived in a world where all of us are so absorbed with social media and our phones and security breaches. And yet, when deployed correctly, technology is the single biggest lever we have to expanding availability of health care, improving the health care that we deliver, and frankly, elevating all of us as a community in what we can expect of the health care system. And so even though there are a lot of reasons to be cautious and skeptical and thoughtful about how we use technology, there's no question in my mind that technologies like cloud and artificial intelligence and the deep embedded nature of those things with the physician experience has the potential to make the world such a better place from the health care perspective than the one we've lived in for years gone by. And the more we can embrace that and do it in a thoughtful, prudent, and appropriate way, the better or faster we're likely to be able to knock down some walls that are in our way right now and in a cost-effective way get to a better health care system.