Clarifying earlier communications, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued a transmittal updating the physician supervision regulation as mandated in the Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System (HOPPS) 2011 Final Rule.

Since the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act went into effect in February 2010, regulations regarding health-care data security have become more stringent than ever before. For instance, the DHHS secretary is required to publish the names of covered entities that have experienced any data breach involving

There are two major ways that a physician ends up in court, sued for malpractice: first, by providing care in a negligent manner; second, by failing to inform the patient properly. While radiologists are not exempt from the former problem, they have largely been shielded from the latter because the job of communicating findings has, by professional

Every advance in imaging technology—the proliferation of slices per CT scan, the mounting use of MRI and CT to diagnose heart disease, and the increasing prevalence of digital mammography—also advances one IT challenge in particular: storing and protecting image information in the event of a disaster. “Imaging is growing exponentially,” Corey

Decision support might be the technology that brings imaging out of external control and back into self-regulation, since its effectiveness appears to equal or exceed that of other utilization-management strategies (including burdensome preauthorization). Every decision-support program, however, must be able to tell the ordering physician how

You might recall that a few years ago, in this column, I extolled the virtues of a unique book by Daniel Pink called A Whole New Mind: Why Right-brainers Will Rule the Future (Riverhead, 2006). It discusses the emergence, in our society, of a new appreciation for a balance between left- and right-brain thinking.

Putting radiologists on alert that the competition for HITECH funds may be more intense than previously thought, 81% of U.S. hospitals and 41% of office-based physicians currently plan to leverage federal incentive payments for health IT adoption and meaningful use, according to data released earlier this week by the Office of the National

The recession put the squeeze on U.S. health care spending in 2009, but health care expenditures also took a bigger, record-setting bite out of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), according to a report released earlier this week by CMS.