From the Chair: Making Lemonade Out of Lemons - SIIM News Fall 2009

Bradley J. Erickson, MD, PhD
Chair

The past weekend was a weekend for lemonade. A warm, bright sun, just a little wind, and several boys and girls from around the neighborhood playing various forms of ball. Yes, there was even the traditional ‘lemonade for sale’ stand that appeared for a day. Our current economic environment also seems to cry out the familiar phrase “When given lemons, make lemonade!”  We are in the midst of difficult times, and I must admit some level of frustration. We are all being told to do more with less. The challenge before us is to figure out a way to make this challenge an opportunity.

The SIIM leadership is taking this opportunity to re-work its plans. SIIM had always enjoyed rapid member growth and strong corporate support. These permitted bold and exciting plans to be put into place. Now we are experiencing challenges to those patterns. But the strained resources have also made us re-think how SIIM can best serve its members.

It seems that cost containment is going to reduce the ability of many SIIM members to travel, particularly if the primary purpose is education. We believe that there is still a very important role for the annual meeting, including networking and other professional interactions, which simply cannot be replaced by “virtual” options. In addition, the opportunity to see multiple vendor products and meet with vendor representatives in close proximity is an efficient way to focus in on one or two vendors that seem most interesting. The presence of vendor leadership at the meeting also allows for valuable discussions to occur and for decisions to be made. For this reason, SIIM will continue to focus on making the annual meeting a great meeting for all attendees, including those looking for an introductory education, those in the mid-stages of their career, and those with an advanced knowledge who are continuing to push the limits of the field.

For those of you who have attended for several years, you saw a significant change in the structure of the annual meeting, in order to more effectively engage the many adult learners in the audience. The changes included more interactive and team-learning activities. We also worked to integrate research with educational sessions with the hope that those expecting only education would appreciate how research of today is the “education” of tomorrow. Those activities are tightly linked, and the program changes reflect that.

But SIIM has also been actively responding to the demand for other educational materials. SIIM members recently completed a textbook on imaging informatics, under the leadership of Char Branstetter, MD. Practical Imaging Informatics: Foundations and Applications for PACS Professionals is a textbook and might appear conventional, although its format is much more interactive in nature. 

Many of you will also have noticed the change in the Expert Hotline. Our intent is to provide more thorough answers, and to make that content more accessible to all users, not just the person asking the initial question.

We also want to use the web to engage members on a personal level, and help them improve how they do their everyday work. A recent example of that is the Conficker computer virus.

For those of you who aren’t aware of this, this is a very sophisticated form of malware that has proven challenging to eradicate. The reason this has drawn more attention in the medical field is that some medical imaging devices are infected and that is known because this virus has a unique “signature,” which can be captured as the virus attempts to spread to other computers. We are in the process of contacting sites that appear to have infected devices, and working on a communications plan to assure that helpful information is provided to those sites.

The development of a more functional and useful website is a clear priority for SIIM. Over the years, much content has been added. We will continue this, with the focus now on adding more interactivity and community aspects. In particular, while lectures and slides can be very useful for those early in the learning curve, providing mechanisms to learn from others with similar problems (and to provide answers to problems you have solved) is an important next step for the SIIM website. This is not a simple task, and we encourage those with ideas to let us know how we can most effectively leverage the content we have, connect the many users we have who have valuable experience, and engage the vendors who also want to see us use their products effectively and improve them.

I also want to take this opportunity to let all members know about SIIM’s focus on imaging informatics at the international level. SIIM has always enjoyed solid participation from around the world, and we think that SIIM could provide an even better service by further engaging the international community. While final plans have not been set, we expect that some form of programming will be done in Europe and Asia.

The past year has been a challenge for most of us–there were rapid and dramatic changes in most organizations to contain costs. While those changes were not always pleasant, it presented an opportunity to re-think why certain traditions had developed. I hope that all of you had this summer to reflect on how you could take lemons and make lemonade.

Dr. Erickson is a Professor in the Department of Radiology at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester.