American healthcare is a brave new world — driving transformative change that can be characterized as a transition from a volume-based, fee-for-service model to a patient-centered, value-based one. This transformation is creating new, challenging realities across healthcare that will require physician leaders to be prepared with more effective leadership skills and competencies.

According to Cheri L. Canon, MD, FACR, chair of radiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s School of Medicine, success in this landscape depends on producing a new breed of radiology leaders: leaders equipped with modern leadership knowledge and competencies to be effective, persuasive, and influential; leaders who understand profoundly how radiology fits into the bigger picture of healthcare. These leaders must be engaged across ever-widening spheres of influence, including small group practices, hospital departments, multiple-hospital healthcare systems, in organized medicine, and in local, state, and national political arenas.¹

How do emerging and established leaders go about doing this? And what resources are available to help them along the way? The pages of this issue illuminate the ways radiologists, at all career levels, are developing and practicing leadership skills — to lead change rather than follow it.