Acclaimed stage and screen actor Avery Brooks playfully demanded to know “where are the flying cars” in that insurance company television commercial, an ode to a bygone era of popular science fiction that predicted our primary mode of transportation by the third millennium. Back in the 1950s, people whimsically dreamed about what the world would be like 50 years from then and how we would live, play and work with technology that made things so much easier. But today saw no flying cars, Brooks lamented in mock disappointment.

Picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) are capable of finally realizing the full potential of digital modalities, and facilities are finding PACS an indispensable component of their technological toolkits. Most important, PACS is proving to be an important strategy for keeping physicians efficient and happy, as well as providing a new revenue source for multispecialty practices.

Riding along in the car recently, my 13-year-old son told me that viewing a Holocaust dramatization and then meeting concentration-camp-survivor Marion Blumenthal Lazan at his school had brought tears to his eyes. I wish such evil did not exist in our children’s history books, but truly there is no better way than what he experienced to help this and future distant generations know and remember that era of suffering.