Boca Raton, Florida, became a competitive market for medical imaging when entrepreneurial nonphysicians began opening freestanding imaging centers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Carl Rosenkrantz, MD, a radiologist with West Boca Medical Center (WBMC), recalls. “In South Florida, hospitals were reluctant, early on, to get into the outpatient imaging center business, and a tremendous number of nonphysicians got into the business just to make a profit,” he says. “A huge amount of marketing was done concerning them, and patients became accustomed to going to these freestanding centers that were not hospital affiliated.”

When Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath devastated New York, New York, in October 2012, perhaps no one was more vulnerable than the patients needing care in area hospitals. Eli Tarlow, CIO of the city’s Bellevue Hospital Center (BHC), recalls, “It was the best of times and worst of times—a natural event that no one could have prevented. You really see the best of your staff in moments of crisis, and that held true during Hurricane Sandy. Staff members at all levels volunteered to do anything necessary, from bringing needed supplies up and down many flights of stairs to helping with preparing or delivering food for patients. Nothing came between the employees and the work that needed to be done to maintain patient care.”

It seems that I was not the only one alarmed by “Bitter Pill,”¹ about which I wrote in my commentary last month. In a meeting the week after the article hit newsstands, the discussion of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) about hospital consolidation took a turn for the accusatory, with the pro–free-market organization concluding that the hospital market is broken.

The ACR will “aggressively fight any approach” that does not incorporate decision support and appropriateness criteria, vows ACR official in her reaction to the budget.

When CMS expanded the MPPR methodology to include the professional component of imaging, the argument was that it was a fair and valid to discount subsequent reads after the first read by 25 percent because there are efficiencies in reading multiple scans. A new JACR study finds this is not so.

The Association for Medical Imaging Management (AHRA) announced during its annual meeting in Los Angeles that it endorses Are You Dense Advocacy Inc , the patient advocacy group that has pushed for breast density notification laws at the state and national level

The budget includes money for a fix to the flawed SGR formula for calculating physician payments and recommends closing of the in-office ancillary services exception (IOASE) to the Stark self-referral law.

Canada’s Calgary Scientific Inc has received FDA clearance to market their ResolutionMD™ software to diagnose medical images on Android devices