For nearly a year and a half following the passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, the medical community had one question on its mind: What constitutes meaningful use? The HITECH legislation stresses that in order to receive stimulus funding for health IT, providers must prove meaningful use of

The following is not a trick question: What does the US Army’s legendary 82nd Airborne Division have in common with today’s medical-imaging profession? On the surface, probably not a lot; beneath the surface, however, I’ve seen quite a bit that our profession can learn from the focus, precision, and ethos of one of the finest US organizations. This

The road to PACS perfection is paved with distractions and pitfalls, Paul Chang, MD, FSIIM, says. Chang is professor of radiology, vice chair of radiology informatics, and medical director of enterprise imaging at University of Chicago Medical Center in Illinois. During the 2010 Dwyer Lecture, “The Role of Imaging Informatics in the Next Generation

The radiology department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Boston, Massachusetts, developed a policy for communicating critical and discrepant results after the Joint Commission made communications among caregivers a national priority for health-care providers. When the goal was expanded in 2007, the department took the next step and used IT

The San Francisco General Hospital/University of California–San Francisco Department of Radiology has created a groundbreaking communications tool called Radiologue. Alexander V. Rybkin, MD, a radiologist in that department, described the system in “A Web-based Flexible Communication System in Radiology,” which he presented in Minneapolis,

Integration has been a buzzword in the radiology community for some time, and the team at Valhalla, New York-based Westchester Medical Center (WMC) knows why. “We used to have PACS, RIS, and voice recognition all working separately from one another,” Mike Seiler, director of radiology IT at WMC, explains. “Today, they’re all tightly integrated. We

The familiar, contentious debate surrounding Medicare’s sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula came to a temporary close on June 24, when the House of Representatives, by passing HR 3962, finally agreed to a Senate plan to put off a 21.3% decrease in payment rates. The payment fix is only effective through November 30, however, ensuring yet another

As the technology used for radiologic studies matures, providers and referrers are increasingly focused on providing patients with a friendlier imaging environment—with good reason, according to Tariq Gill, MD. “We need to make a conscious effort to make things nonthreatening,” he says. “In our community, we have three main hospitals, and each one