Friday, April 28, 2006 – Austin, Texas – The Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) welcomed the newest member of the College of SIIM Fellows, Janice Honeyman-Buck, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Digital Imaging and Associate Professor and Director of Informatics in the Department of Radiology at the University of Florida. Honeyman-Buck was introduced by David Avrin, MD, president of the College of SIIM Fellows, during the Society’s annual business meeting today in conjunction with its Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.

Honeyman-Buck is one of the early adopters of PACS and digital imaging. After completing her PhD work in computer science, Honeyman-Buck joined the faculty of Drexel University in Information Sciences. Having formerly been a radiological technologist, nuclear medicine  technologist and a radiology administrator, she soon realized a desire to get back into radiology. She was invited to implement a PACS at the University of Florida, joining the faculty of the Department of Radiology in 1989.

Since that time, the Department has successfully built and maintained a full clinical PACS with all studies online since 1992, all reading except mammography performed on soft copy, interfaced with speech recognition dictation and the hospital radiology information systems. Currently serving as Director of Informatics, under her direction the department has developed not only the PACS, speech recognition and high-level image processing functionality, but also a comprehensive intranet that manages conference schedules, resident evaluations, over-read (CQI) requirements, internal communications, and procedure manuals. The environment can support video conferences among the institutions in its enterprise, and supports a very large and comprehensive online teaching file.

Honeyman-Buck also has achieved success as the Editor-in-Chief of SIIM’s peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of Digital Imaging. When appointed to the position in 2003, the journal had few manuscript submissions and a manual workflow process. In her first year as Editor-in-Chief, the manuscript submission process was brought online, new authors were recruited and workflow improved. Since then, the journal has seen a rapid increase in the number and quality of manuscripts submitted and, as a result, the journal’s impact factor has increased from 0.689 to 2.098 in the last three years, with its ranking among radiology journals improving from 68^th out of 81 journals to 29^th out of 84 journals.

Throughout her career she has been active in RSNA, SPIE, and RISC/SCAR/SIIM since 1990. She was one of the founding members and was assigned to the RSNA Electronic Communication Committee from 1991-1997. She has published in many radiological journals, and ran a categorical course on “Computers for Clinical Practice and Education in Radiology” at RSNA in 1992. Along with five co-authors, she wrote and published a Mosby-Yearbook on “Current Problems in Diagnostic Radiology – Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS)” in 1994.

Honeyman-Buck’s first contribution to SIIM was in the proceedings of the 10^th conference on Computer Applications in Radiology, SCAR90, “Clinical and Research Radiology Network at the University of Florida.”

Future endeavors for Honeyman-Buck will be in the areas associated with Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), Electronic Medical Records and Transforming the Radiological Interpretation Process (TRIP™). Her department is working to integrate radiology information and images to improve radiology workflow. Her work in this area has lead to an increasing interest in examining how to better incorporate all available information and create navigation tools to assist the radiologist during the interpretation process as well as to communicate the complete picture of the patient including images, physician notes, lab results, etc., to other caregivers. She recently contributed a chapter to a Wiley Encyclopedia entitled, “The Radiology Information System and Its Evolving Contribution to the Electronic Medical Record,” and she intends to pursue this investigation in the future.

Honeyman-Buck plans to remain an active supporter of imaging and medical informatics in general, and of SIIM in particular.

Honeyman-Buck joins an august list of electronic imaging pioneers who are SIIM Fellows:

• Robert M. Allman, MD

• Ronald L. Arenson, MD

• David E. Avrin, MD, PhD

• Roger A. Bauman, MD

• Paul J. Chang, MD

• Samuel J. Dwyer, PhD

• Joseph N. Gitlin, DPH

• Robert A. Greenes, MD, PhD

• Steven C. Horii, MD

• Gilbert R. Jost, MD

• John W. Loop, MD

• Eliot L. Siegel, MD

The College of SIIM Fellows was previously the College of SCAR Fellows. The name was changed in conjunction with the name change from SCAR to SIIM – the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine.