01 · A platform that came with the deal
Inherited, then chosen
Four or five years ago Vulcan Imaging Associates acquired another practice, and that practice was already running AbbaDox for its breast health work. That is how the relationship started, not through a bake-off or an RFP, but as one of the systems that came with the business.
Which makes what happened next the interesting part. An inherited system is the easiest thing in the world to rip out: nobody on the acquiring side picked it, nobody is invested in it, and consolidation is the usual excuse. Vulcan kept it instead. Eric Blackman also notes that several of the facilities his group reads for use the same platform for their registration and scheduling, so the group meets it from more than one direction.
- Acquired a practice already running the breast health module
- No selection process on Vulcan’s side: it arrived with the deal
- Kept and extended rather than consolidated away
- Also encountered through the facilities the group reads for
02 · What a sub-specialized team needs
Breast tracking, for two different reasons
Vulcan runs a highly sub-specialized breast imaging team, and breast tracking is the capability the group uses most. The obvious reason is regulatory: the Mammography Quality Standards Act requires a practice to be able to produce this data, and gathering it by hand across a group is exactly the kind of work that does not scale.
The second reason is the one Eric Blackman volunteers, and it is not about compliance at all. The same tracking lets the group follow the clinical quality of its own radiologists. For a reading group that is the product, the read itself, so being able to measure it is not an administrative nicety. His phrase is that they use it for both of those reasons, in that order.
- A highly sub-specialized breast imaging team
- Breast tracking as the most-used capability
- MQSA data producible rather than assembled by hand
- The same data used to follow radiologist clinical quality
Why it matters
“Not only to make sure we have it from an MQSA standpoint, but also, so we follow clinical quality for our radiologists.”
Eric Blackman, CEO
Vulcan Imaging Associates
03 · Why it stayed
A vendor he can name the people at
Asked to describe the company rather than the software, he does not talk about features. He says it is personal: a growing team, but not so large that he does not know who works there, and the same people every time. For a CEO who inherited a system he did not pick, that is a reasonable proxy for whether it is worth keeping.
The structure behind it is a standing conversation. At least once a year, usually more often, the two sides sit down over Vulcan’s goals as a business and what should change in the partnership, including where the practice is heading and whether the existing tools will still fit it in a few years. He describes that as the thing that has shone.
- The same people, not a rotating account team
- Annual or more frequent strategy conversations
- Product direction discussed against the group’s own trajectory
- A partnership he judges by the relationship, not the feature list
04 · What he wants next
Give the radiologists their attention back
The thing he is looking forward to is not a new module. It is subtraction: the laborious manual information gathering that sits between a radiologist and the study in front of them. His question is how to pull that information up and out of the way, so the people whose judgment the group sells can spend their attention on judgment.
That is the same argument the rest of this set makes from the front desk, arriving here from the reading room instead. A group whose product is the read has a particularly direct interest in it: every minute a sub-specialist spends assembling context is a minute not spent on the thing only they can do.
- Manual information gathering as the target, not a feature gap
- Context assembled for the radiologist rather than by them
- Attention treated as the scarce resource in a reading group
- “Make them do what they do best: be clinicians”
Client story