Many radiology practices, by now, have been persuaded of the importance of deeper alignment and integration with their hospitals and health systems. Jana Landreth, director of practice management for Zotec-MMP, says, “If your hospital approaches you wanting this, you need to embrace it. Going into this with reluctance or hesitation will not move your relationship forward, and the odds are that you will wind up doing it eventually anyway. If you embrace it now, you will be able to set the goals with the hospital and make them realistic for what your practice can achieve.”

Inverness Medical Imaging (Inverness, Florida) had an especially strong motivation to apply for federal meaningful-use incentives: With a payor mix that was 60% Medicare, the radiology practice knew that the eventual penalties for not attesting to meaningful use would be too big a hit to sustain. John Erler, administrator, says, “The incentives are good, but if you aren’t meaningful-use compliant, the government will eventually reduce your reimbursement through Medicare. That’s a huge portion of our business, so it made sense for us to get onboard now and get as much of the incentive money as possible.”

The standard of value must be established in performing a valuation of any imaging business. The standard of value defines the hypothetical conditions under which a valuation will be performed. These hypothetical conditions affect many of the underlying assumptions that an appraiser or valuator would employ in establishing a value opinion.

At the 2013 annual meeting of the AHRA, held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Chad Calendine, MD, CMO of Optimal Radiology Partners, presented “Radiologist As the Chief Marketing Officer” on July 28. The focus of his session was how radiology groups can enhance their value and visibility to the rest of the health-care continuum; Calendine believes that radiologists should more aggressively market themselves to stakeholders ranging from patients and referring clinicians to hospital administration.

Any community under duress is likely to find itself plagued by disagreements, infighting, and polemicizing. It’s a normal response to a difficult situation—especially one in which there are no easy answers to the challenges being faced. I think of this each time that I attend management-focused meetings (such as those of the AHRA or the RBMA) in which nonclinician businesspeople point to radiologists as the source of imaging’s current problems; at clinical conferences, physician thought leaders cite the increased focus on business-based priorities, such as productivity and efficiency, as the real issue.

Four additional senators — two Republicans and two Democrats, have signed on to S. 623, the Diagnostic Imaging Services Access Protection Act of 2013, which seeks to stop the multiple procedure payment reduction (MPPR) policy from being applied to the professional component of imaging services

CT colonography is less expensive and more preferred by patients compared to traditional colonoscopy for colon cancer screening, but the question of whether it is as good a test has so far kept it out of reach for most Medicare patients. An FDA panel examined this question on Monday

A failure analysis of more than 7,000 breast-cancer deaths published online by the journal Cancer has found that 71 percent of the confirmed breast cancer deaths occurred in the 20 percent of the study population that did not receive regular mammograms. In addition, the women who died tended to be younger than 50