As accountability in health care becomes an increasingly critical priority, many anticipate a future in which radiologists are employed by hospitals attempting to share risk and align incentives. Accountability can be achieved without employment, however, according to Carl Black, MD, of Utah Radiology Associates (URA), Orem/Provo, a 24-physician practice covering five hospital systems, including the oft-lauded Intermountain Healthcare (Orem). The practice’s relationship with Intermountain Healthcare was the subject of a presentation made by Black on July 28, 2013, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the annual meeting of the AHRA

Clinical analytics for radiology practices, in its current form, is defined by nothing so much as its limitations, according to Benjamin Strong, MD, CMO of Virtual Radiologic (vRad). “Practices don’t have the kinds of actionable insights they should, in terms of study characteristics, study mix, referring patterns, workflow, RVUs, and so on,” Strong says. “It’s something with which practices are struggling, if they’re even aware that they don’t have the analytics they need. We were managing blind during the good old days, and that continued for so long that many people don’t even miss analytics.”

On July 16, CMS announced the results1 of its accountable-care organization (ACO) program, the Pioneer ACO Model. The program was designed to test the impact of higher levels of shared savings and risk on ACO success, and it attracted 32 participants from around the country. After the first year of participation, seven Pioneer ACOs that did not produce shared savings announced their intention to transition to the lower-risk (and lower-reward) Medicare Shared Savings Program, while two dropped out of the ACO model entirely.

Disaster recovery is an event that PACS administrators hope that they never will have to confront, but it is increasingly clear that it needs to be a top-of-mind concern. Natural disasters, particularly tornadoes and floods, seem to be occurring more frequently, with greater intensity and with more resulting damage. Hospitals and imaging centers are not exempt from their effects.

With more than 800 active health IT applications to maintain, Bill Russell has no time for distractions. The senior vice president and CIO of St Joseph Health—a nonprofit integrated health-care network that includes 14 hospitals in California and Texas—has a lot on his plate.

After four days of ravaging Jamaica, Cuba, and the Bahamas, Hurricane Sandy slammed into the New Jersey shoreline on October 29, 2012, resulting in losses of $30 billion to businesses in the affected area; damaging or destroying 346,000 homes; causing widespread power outages (some of which lasted for several weeks); and killing 37 people. Neither the popular seaside city of Cape May nor Cape Regional Medical Center (CRMC), a 240-bed community hospital in Cape May Court House, suffered damage from what turned out to be the deadliest, most destructive hurricane of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season—and the second-costliest storm of its type in U.S. history.

The emergence of a new, powerful imaging modality is cause for both celebration and consternation, and digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) has proven no exception to this rule, according to participants in a June 8 educational forum at the 2013 meeting of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM), held in Grapevine, Texas. Early results from sites offering DBT to their patients have been nothing short of extraordinary: X-ray Associates of New Mexico (XRANM) in Albuquerque, for instance, reports a 48% reduction in its recall rate, while the University of Pittsburg Medical Center (UPMC) in Pennsylvania has seen a 40% increase in detection of invasive breast cancers, with a reduction in false positives of 15%.

For a cardiologist, Wm. Guy Weigold, MD, spends an unusual amount of time in front of a monitor. “I happen to be a cardiologist who has expertise in cardiac CT,” he explains. “I spend the majority of my time looking at images.” Weigold is director of the cardiac CT program at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, DC, and he directs