Radiology practices interface with many disparate information systems that produce data, but generating meaningful reports that pull information from all of those systems—PACS, RIS, billing, and reporting—is too cumbersome to be done with any regularity. As payors begin to link reimbursement to outcomes and episodes of care replace individual

Improvement of commercial-payor contracts can result in significant revenue gains and better contracts for medical groups, with radiology practices among them. Successfully negotiating such deals, however—and optimizing them to include financial dividends—necessitates that actionable business intelligence be brought to the bargaining table.

Dow Jones & Co filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida earlier this week in an effort to overturn a 1979 court order barring access to Medicare claims data.

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