This article is second in a four-part series on health-care reform and radiology. To read the first article in the series, click here.

Soaring penalties and new privacy, security, and breach-notification provisions intended to modernize HIPAA have raised the stakes in the patient-privacy arena and rewritten the HIPAA rulebook. Radiology departments, practices, and their business associates are well advised to sit up and take notice.

Archiving and distributing the large data sets associated with images can be a challenge for many radiology practices. University Radiology in New Brunswick, New Jersey, would encounter a larger-than-usual share of obstacles on this front if it were not for a carefully thought-out image-archiving and -distribution strategy built upon the unique

Arlington-based Virginia Hospital Center (VHC) performs nearly 200,000 imaging studies annually, between its cardiology and radiology departments. Behyar Ghahramani, manager of medical systems engineering at VHC, estimates that cardiology accounts for between 45,000 and 50,000 studies a year, while radiology is responsible for 140,000 to 150,000.

On April 14, 2011, Hitachi Medical Systems America, Inc (Twinsburg, Ohio), announced the FDA approval of its first 64-slice CT system, SCENARIA™. ImagingBiz.com spoke with Mark Silverman, manager of CT marketing for Hitachi, about the company’s goals for the new product and the assessment of the current CT marketplace that drove its design.

In today’s challenging business environment, it is more critical than ever before that radiology groups engage in strategic planning. Ironically, the same factors that make strategic planning so necessary to a group’s survival also make it difficult to dedicate resources to the process. Those practices that do carve out the necessary time will see

The current trend toward hospital–physician integration has renewed the focus of leaders on both sides on developing fair, sustainable physician-compensation plans. On March 21, 2011, in Chicago, Illinois, at the Congress on Healthcare Leadership of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE), three speakers, Timothy J. Cotter, Ralph

Radiology has been in the regulatory crosshairs for almost six years, ever since the DRA eliminated billions in reimbursements for imaging—and the profession can expect the trend to continue, if it doesn’t invest in research now. That’s the contention of Christoph I. Lee, MD, a UCLA Robert Wood Johnson Foundation clinical scholar, and Howard P.