When Christopher Garcia, MD, MHS, completed his post-residency fellowship in 2015, he was looking forward to kickstarting his career in radiology. As he considered the variety of job opportunities before him—joining a private practice, working at a hospital—one option made more sense than any others: reading remotely from ­­­­the comfort of his Connecticut home as a teleradiologist.  

The COVID crisis has showcased for a worldwide audience telehealth’s potential for bringing top-notch medical care wherever it’s needed. Safety-minded Americans have registered their approval by voting with their screens: The CDC reported a 154% jump in telehealth visits during the last week of March 2020 vs. the same week in 2019.

As 2020 comes to a close, radiologists find their profession at a major crossroads. AI and other game-changing technologies are rapidly evolving, government policies are forcing practices to rethink their business models, and a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic continues to cause chaos for the entire healthcare industry. 

New Technology Add-On Payments (NTAP) are a class of reimbursement that are meant to help pay for new technology that is not included in the DRG bundled payment. Specifically, NTAP recognizes that current DRG payment rates can be a barrier to adopting new technology and represents an additional payment for hospital stays that use new technology determined by CMS to provide substantial clinical improvement and where the current DRG payment would be inadequate.

“Enterprise imaging” is a term that’s bandied about in healthcare. But what does it actually mean, and is your organization getting the most bang for its buck out of this very important process?

Connecticut-based Hyperfine made waves earlier this year when it announced the arrival of what it calls the “world’s first” portable MRI scanner. Which brings about interesting questions: How does it work? Is it replacing traditional technology? And what has COVID-19 meant for mobile imaging?

Last year the institutional leadership at Texas’s University Health System, which contracts with the UT Health San Antonio physician network, made the decision to move all inpatient imaging off the radiology department’s PACS and onto a new enterprise imaging (EI) platform. Their goal was internal consolidation. 

As recently as eight months ago, cardiologists sitting down to work with medical images at Novant Health had plenty of choices on where and how to go about that part of their jobs.