Giving patients unrestricted, on-demand access to primary-care doctors for a fixed monthly fee cuts overall care costs by almost 20 percent while also improving patient satisfaction.

A breach at an Alabama hospital that resulted in a two-year jail term for a hospital employee suggests that insider threats to patient data security may be greater challenge than many providers understand.

Already a week into the new year, the healthcare industry is buzzing with energy and focused on the road ahead. 

One of the topics weighing heavily on the minds of those providers who perused all the new CT imaging equipment on display at RSNA 2014 was the new legislation dedicated to medical imaging as it relates to making provisions to more strictly control CT dosage requirements under NEMA Standard XR-29-2013.

In the year ahead, radiologists must continue to adapt to changes and rise to the evolving challenges delivered by health care reform, including better utilization of available data that are necessary to inform practice decisions and make long-term, significant changes to sustain their businesses, according to Mark Isenberg, Partner of Client Services with Zotec Partners. Isenberg discusses five topics with imagingBiz that should be on the radar for all radiologists in the coming year.

From the floor of the 100th Annual Meeting of the RSNA, buzzwords were a-flying—value-based medicine, Internet-based systems, storage in the cloud, zero-footprint viewers and plenty of compact imaging technologies. Attendees were deluged with demonstrations of new and updated imaging systems, clinical presentations, as well as updates on image processing, storage and sharing capabilities. From a big picture perspective, however, the message was clear—collaboration is key.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 43 million Americans show overdue medical debt on their credit reports. And a lot of them don’t even know about it until a collector starts calling and their credit score has already been damaged. 

The business of healthcare continues to change and radiology groups are looking beyond the bare branches of low hanging fruit which have provided short-term fixes to various business and reimbursement challenges.