At NYU Langone Medical Center (NYULMC), New York, New York, even though the radiology department’s billing office adheres to the principle of a cross-trained staff pool, it practices the explicit division of labor: Coders do nothing but code, payment posters post payments, claims processors specialize in making sure exams are coded and processed

Each year, nearly 800,000 people in the United States suffer strokes, making cerebrovascular disease the nation’s third leading cause of death (behind heart disease and cancer). Virtually all of these patients end up in hospital emergency departments, where the ability to distinguish between ischemic strokes and the less common hemorrhagic strokes

In a December 2 session at RSNA 2009 in Chicago, Illinois, on using next-generation health care IT to improve radiology, David Avrin, MD, PhD, radiologist at the University of California–San Francisco Medical Center, opened with a comment made to him by one of his hospital administrators: “Images these days are so clear that even I can read them.”

In urging radiologists to adopt a new focus on quality improvement, RSNA outgoing president Gary Becker, MD, outlines the steps necessary to achieve this goal and calls informatics integral to the process. “As we enter the era of personalized medicine and value-based purchasing in medicine, delivery of the highest quality, most efficient care will

Ramin Khorasani, MD

When the 16 hospitals of the Western North Carolina Health Network (WNCHN) sat down to create a federated model for a health information exchange (HIE) four years ago, they could find no examples of unaffiliated institutions sharing health data, so WNCHN essentially began with a tabula rasa.

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

The nation’s hospitals eluded a $1 billion pay cut on October 1, when the 2010 Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) went into effect, because CMS chose not to include a negative 1.9% update for payments to hospitals as originally proposed. On the other hand, imaging-technology owners in the freestanding outpatient and in-office settings are