by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | February 25, 2016
From the January/February 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
HCB News: Being at RSNA, what kind of differences have you noticed between that conference and the ECR?
KAR: RSNA is still larger, but there are a lot of similarities, with some key differences. Of the 64,000 members, 49 percent are from Europe. The rest come from around the world. RSNA is held in a larger building and there are the technical exhibitions. The struggles are similar in the U.S. and Europe.
HCB News: What countries make up the largest portions of your membership?
KAR: There is a high correlation between the size of the country and number of members. The large countries — Germany, France and Spain — have more than Denmark, Iceland and so on.
HCB News: Is it a challenge to represent members from different countries? Does health care vary greatly from country to country or is it at a level that’s manageable?
KAR: Every year we have a leadership meeting — 32 countries with 15 subspecialties committees. We find a large difference between the levels of equipment, the amount of equipment, between countries. It varies especially among our members of countries outside of Europe — we have all levels countries that don’t have a lot of resources themselves. We want to homogenize the level of training in the countries where our members are located. It’s a challenge, with so many countries and situations.
HCB News: What do you think the biggest challenges are for health care in Europe today?
KAR:The challenge for radiology is that they feel a lack of radiologists and a lack of equipment. For radiologists themselves, though, the situation is quite good. They can choose where to work, how much to work. Radiologists are also getting more tools. More biomarkers to help with more precise evaluations of examinations, for example. There’s a continuous development of CT/MR and ultrasound. Conventional development is a little slower. For the working situation, there’s much more demand, with patient process and optimizing the use of time. I feel that what we’re seeing is a high-speed push.
HCB News: How do you think health care will change in the next 10 years?
KAR:There’s a lot of ongoing discussion. Radiology is a huge area of competence. Subspecialties will have a lot of changes — abdominal oncology, gastrointestinal — lots. Imaging will be taking care of the specialists that have the best knowledge and are up to date on the research. If radiology will continue to be the face of imaging, education will need to be leading the way. It might be different developments in different subspecialties: More and more cost control, more evaluation for each image, more use of markers to create a huge amount of data.
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