Medicare is looking for misvalued imaging codes—and it has already found several for which it has reduced payment. Its efforts have dismayed radiologists. Facing more revenue losses from CMS and the private insurers that follow in the agency’s footprints, radiologists feel targeted and, as a specialty, misvalued themselves.
By the nature of their subspecialty, interventional radiologists are enamored of innovations that engender emerging minimally invasive therapies, and the 2011 annual meeting of the Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) in Chicago, Illinois, did not disappoint. Interventional-radiology researchers reported promising outcomes from clinical trials
Medical billing is the process of translating a physician’s work into reimbursable language understood by governmental and private third-party payors. The billing process must start with the physician’s documentation of patient encounters, which forms the basis for billing. The physician’s documentation is then translated into a CPT® code
When Radiology Business Journal was founded four years ago, it was with the understanding that IT represented not just the platform for image interpretation, exchange, and archiving, but also a broad foundation for practice operations, communications, and financial analysis. Earlier this year (and with that in mind), we approached the Society for
The June 2011 MedPAC Report to the Congress1 has the undivided attention of the entire specialty, just days after its release—for good reason. Pages 27 through 59 detail the commission’s recommendations to curtail further the amount of imaging occurring in medicine and to redistribute professional income from image-reading specialties to primary
Radiology’s existing coding structure is undergoing a dramatic transformation, which is the product of numerous code screens being used by CMS and the RVS Update Committee to identify potentially misvalued services. The application of these code screens often results in the conversion of old codes to new codes. The conversion to new codes has
There is bad news and good news for radiology, when it comes to meeting meaningful-use requirements, according to Keith Dreyer, DO, PhD, vice chair of radiology computing and information sciences at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. In the Dwyer Lecture, “Meaningful Use in Medical Imaging: New Technologies for US Healthcare Reform,”
Breast MRI has emerged as a powerful new tool in the fight against breast cancer. It has found wide acceptance in the past 10 years, and it appears to be one of the most rapidly growing medical studies. When breast MRI is combined with mammography and breast ultrasound, we are now able to find breast cancer at its earliest stages, when the disease
In his preview¹ in Health Affairs of the impending data deluge scheduled to begin with the transition to ICD-10 on October 1, 2013, Harris Meyer explains that the international disease-classification system dates back to 1763, when—in an act of altruism toward his fellow physicians—Francois Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix (1706–1767) published a
On June 7, 2011, at the Annual Summit of the RBMA in New Orleans, Louisiana, four CEOs and one senior leader—representing all five radiology benefit management (RBM) companies—participated in a panel discussion during a general session, “Face to Face With RBM CEOs: Shaping the Dialogue for Imaging’s New Realities.” Look for coverage of that session
Editor Cheryl Proval and I had the privilege of moderating a very interesting and animated session at the recent RBMA meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. It was a face-to-face panel discussion with the CEOs of each of the five radiology benefit management (RBM) companies. Anticipation built during the conference, and the attendees were definitely
