The flawed Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula is a dark cloud of uncertainty that annually hangs over healthcare practitioners, threatening to trigger the government-mandated double digit cut in reimbursement rates for Medicare beneficiaries. When the temporary SGR patch was extended in April 2014 (for the 17th time), it was the inclusion of the ICD-10 delay that took healthcare by surprise and overshadowed other provisions of the Act. While the ICD-10 delay certainly warrants the attention of healthcare providers, there are other provisions included in the Protecting Access to Medicare Act (PAMA) of 2014 that deserve equal attention so that clinicians can prepare for the impending changes.

Last summer brought something of a media moment for mammography in the U.S. The spotlight shone on the star—3-D imaging for breast-cancer screening—after the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study showing that tomosynthesis, when added to digital mammography, is a natural at catching invasive cancers while exposing false positives as impostors.

When four-state Mercy broke ground on a four-story, 120,000-square-foot virtual-care center on a patch of green in Chesterfield, Mo., last spring, the blueprint represented a bold and visionary step into American healthcare’s digital future, as the center may be the first of its kind anywhere in the world. The organization estimates that the center will manage more than three million telehealth visits in the first five years following its scheduled 2015 opening.

Tomosynthesis is a relatively new type of imaging technology that utilizes x-rays to create a 3-dimensional image of the breast and is mainly used to detect and diagnose cancers. Not yet considered the standard in clinical care, most imaging centers still employ conventional digital mammograms as their primary method of detecting breast cancer. Conventional mammograms take x-rays of the breast from different angles to create cross-sectional 2-dimensional images. Imaging centers must decide if replacing existing conventional mammography systems with tomosynthesis makes sense from a clinical and financial perspective. What are some factors that drive this decision making process? Will adding this technology to your imaging center create value for shareholders?

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina—the deadliest storm of its kind in U.S. history—made its final landfall near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi with a 28-foot storm surge and a storm tide of more than 30 feet deep. Like 80 percent of New Orleans, many neighboring parishes, and a multitude of other coastal towns along the Gulf of Mexico, Bay St. Louis was devastated by the hurricane.

Blue Mountain Health System may not have been early to the digital revolution when it implemented its first RIS/PACS in 2010, but it has moved further than many larger health systems in the intervening four years.Since implementation, the two-hospital community health system has dramatically reduced turnaround time, increased technologist productivity and improved patient satisfaction and safety. Much of that improvement can be attributed to Blue Mountain’s crowning achievement: It has achieved a 100% paperless workflow in the radiology department.

To Cory Cino, the history of Wyoming County Community Health System in Western New York divides neatly between “before RIS” and “everything since.”The PACS administrator vividly recalls his radiology department doing patient scheduling and tracking on sheets of loose-leaf paper in three-ring binders and reporting via cassette-tape transcriptions on a homegrown database. Then there was perhaps the most cumbersome practice of all: storing pretty much everything the department produced—reports, tapes and, prior to PACS, films—wherever an untaken spot could be found…including on the roof.

The placard project at Spectrum Health Systems is a unique methodology developed by George Vallillee, manager of Radiology Information Solutions, to improve the fidelity of the patient experience during a planned downtime or system disruption.  The project was proposed and initiated by Vallillee, and largely driven by teams whose input was mainly intellectual collateral, drawn from daily workflows, and drawn from the radiology system used throughout Spectrum. Since the rollout of the program, it has been tested and updated regularly to make further improvements in efficiency. Deemed a success by health system executives, the placard program has become a permanent part of Spectrum Health Systems communication plan.