Business Intelligence

Providers utilize business intelligence to monitor referral patterns and collaborate with clinicians who order their services. Such analytics tools have also been deployed in the specialty to improve productivity, track patient satisfaction and bolster quality.

Coalition Forms to Promote Clinical Decision-support Tools

Radisphere

In June, an alliance of health care providers, technology vendors, and imaging organizations announced the formation of the Imaging e-Ordering Coalition, an initiative aimed at promoting health-IT–enabled clinical decision support as a means of determining the appropriateness of diagnostic imaging services. Members of the coalition include the ACR;

Radiology and the Culture of Money

Editor’s note: Curtis Kauffman-Pickelle’s commentary is reprinted from the June/July 2009 issue of Radiology Business Journal.

Say Aloha to Your PACS: The Selection Process

When Hawaii Health Systems Corp (HHSC), Honolulu, began shopping for a PACS solution for three of its five island regions, newly hired CIO Money Atwal had a few unique issues to take into consideration. Though multisite PACS configurations are increasingly commonplace, most don’t have to cross water in order to work. Atwal needed a solution that

Visage Imaging CEO David Chambers: On the Future of Health Care IT

Earlier this year, Pro Medicus Ltd., the Australia-based RIS provider, acquired Visage Imaging. ImagingBiz.com spoke with David Chambers, CEO of Pro Medicus Ltd. and Visage Imaging on the history of the company, details of the acquisition, and the health care IT landscape in the land down under.

2009 MedPAC Report: A New Threat to High-quality Care

In 1997, Congress created the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) to provide recommendations regarding health care policy and reimbursement with respect to the Medicare program. Since then, MedPAC has performed an important and useful role, collecting and analyzing data and trends affecting the means and methods by which the US government

Accreditation and Radiology

Sponsored by Hitachi Healthcare Americas

Accreditation is important to radiology providers not only in ensuring reimbursement eligibility and protecting turf, but in creating the opportunity to make needed operational changes, according to David M. Yousem, MD, MBA. Yousem, who is professor of radiology and director of neuroradiology at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore,

Managing Errors in Demographic/Clinical Information: Using Tracking Mechanisms

All insurance accounts fall into one of two groups: full resolution (at negotiated fees, where the credits only consist of cash, contract adjustment, and probable bad debt, if any patient balance cannot be collected) or full write-off (where the practice did not comply with a payor-based rule).

Grassroots Activism 101

No one is quite sure when the word draconian came to be the semiofficial modifier of the word cuts, when used in conjunction with the noun DRA. Mark Newton recalls hearing it often during the campaign to convince federal lawmakers that their Medicare cost-saving bill was a disaster in the making for radiology.