At Palm Beach Radiology Institute, operated by Palm Beach Radiology and Imaging Associates (PBRIA), there is no film, there never has been film, and no one expects ever to see film. When the outpatient imaging center opened a year ago, it was already an all-digital environment, built from the ground up to accommodate a digital infrastructure and a

To say that the health care regulatory environment has been active over the past two years would be an understatement. The focus of this article is Medicare: the primary payor for health care services in this country and, often, the standard by which other payors establish their payment rules. Revisions to Medicare regulations often foretell what

The CMS Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) program has been made permanent and is expanding nationwide, beginning this year. Radiology providers should act now to adopt and implement appropriate compliance programs. Radiology providers should make efforts to understand the Medicare appeals process and should know that many strategies exist that can be

When John Mowry, digital imaging manager at Cook’s Children’s Health Care System, Fort Worth, Tex, decided to switch from his legacy PACS to a thin-client, Web-based model, he faced a particularly daunting migration situation. The servers in use by the legacy system were on their last legs; meanwhile, there were more than 10 million images across

Radiologists at Yale University figuratively equate their PACS with a toolbox and themselves with artisans, from whose hands now spring forth remarkably useful pictures: namely, manipulated and reconstructed digital images of what lies beneath the epidermis.

At least half of the elements of various success formulas, in business and in life, relate to one’s ability to keep a positive outlook—especially when circumstances make it most difficult to do so. It is so easy to succumb to the temptation to curl up in a fetal position in the face of adversity. Frankly, there is something to be said for the

The CMS Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) is again the center of attention for the medical community. The State Children’s Health Insurance Program bill passed in December 2007 averted the last SGR-mandated cut by funding a 0.5% update for six months. We are, however, once again at the precipice of unprecedented, and arguably untenable, physician

A lesson in business maturity: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer met the company's cofounder Bill Gates when they were both undergraduates at Harvard. Gates dropped out to build one of the most successful companies in history. Ballmer went on to graduate from Harvard and eventually ended up at Stanford, in the graduate school of business. By the time