Medical practices that once focused almost solely on the quality of care are increasingly including profitability and long-term viability in their strategic plans.

On September 8, at the California Radiological Society’s 2012 Annual Meeting & Leadership Summit in San Francisco, Paul Chang, MD, presented “Developing and Deploying Business Dashboards and Scorecards in Radiology.”

Welcome to the inaugural issue of MedAnalytx, the web journal of business analytics and informatics for the health-care practice.

To many people, the evolution of the US health-care system is something taking place through the legislative process—in particular, the 2010 passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Michael Budimir, regional director of imaging services for Franciscan Alliance, an Indiana accountable-care organization (ACO), defines the principal goal of the ACO simply. “Everything has to be patient centered,” he says. “Today, in health care, we have to reevaluate everything from the patient’s perspective. In the ACO model, what helps the patient also helps the institution.”

On September 4, 2013, Zotec Partners completed its planned acquisition of Medical Management Professionals (MMP) and created one of the largest revenue-cycle–management and practice-management companies in the country. The consolidation of the two companies mirrors the consolidation occurring in the primary industry that they serve—radiology—and

In June 2013, University Hospitals Case Medical Center (UHCMC) in Cleveland, Ohio, began feeding information from six of its 24 CT systems into a new dose-monitoring and reporting platform called Sectra DoseTrack™. Dave Jordan, senior medical physicist for the organization, explains that UHCMC turned on the system in early September, after feeding data to it for almost three months. “We were fortunate in that we were able to implement a system like this without a problem we needed to solve,” Jordan notes. “It wasn’t a response to a specific issue with radiation dose that we needed to solve—or a mandate we needed to meet.”

In “Discovering Emerging Value and Transaction Drivers in Imaging,” presented on September 9 in Boston, Massachusetts, at the 2013 RBMA Fall Educational Conference, three panelists from different corners of the imaging industry discussed the topic of emerging value and transaction drivers in the field. Elliott Jeter, CFA/ABV, is a partner with VMG Health; Arun Jethani is CEO of Medical Imaging Specialists; and Richard Townley is president and CEO of AGI Healthcare. The intersection of the panelists’ three perspectives reveals recent market changes affecting imaging-center transactions in 2013 and beyond.