When Jane Wheatley, CEO of Taylor Regional Hospital, Campbellsville, Kentucky, needed to make a decision regarding her facility’s handling of radiology services, she had two imperatives in mind: cost and quality. After the hospital’s radiology group disbanded in the early 2000s, the 90-bed acute care center contracted with an outside radiology

Sharing images across any health care enterprise represents a challenge, but doing so across the Pacific Rim was the dilemma faced in 2003 by the US Air Force. Taking up this challenge were Lt Col Grant Tibbetts, MD, now radiology consultant to the surgeon general, and Tom Lewis, the director of the Air Force PACS Office. “The largest hospital in

Since the dawn of the DRA at the close of 2005, health care observers have predicted a follow-on DRA II. It appears that this prediction will come to pass shortly after the clock strikes midnight on December 31.

Integrated health care delivery systems such as that pioneered by the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, have been heralded for their low-cost, high-quality care and greater efficiency. With all eyes on potential new models for health care delivery—particularly in the imaging field, where skyrocketing costs and questions about appropriate

Less than a year ago, the radiology department at the Fletcher Allen Medical Center (FAMC), Burlington, Vermont, the hospital affiliate of the University of Vermont College of Medicine, was struggling with antiquated peer-review and quality-control (QC) methods. For peer review, according to Steven P. Braff, MD, radiology department chair,

It was a difficult, but not uncommon, neuroradiology case: A patient suffered seizures, but had, a year before, been cleared of the possibility of epilepsy by a radiologist looking at an MRI study of the patient’s brain. The persistence of the symptoms suggested that the initial diagnosis had been incorrect, so Meng Law, MD, professor of radiology

On October 6, 2009, four physicians gathered in Stamford, Connecticut, to participate in a discussion moderated by Cheryl Proval, Radinformatics.com editorial director.

As the entire health care continuum comes under increased scrutiny in terms of both cost and effectiveness, radiologists and administrators alike have fresh cause to contemplate quality in the delivery of imaging services. What are the drivers of quality in radiology, and how can it be quantified, benchmarked, and ensured? As a complex radiology