Radiology might become the first medical specialty to face Medicare’s mythical death panel. If the specialty keeps taking hits, it might die, critics of proposed Medicare reimbursement cuts warn. The death-panel idea began as a political slur, meant to tar advocates of expense reduction for end-of-life care. As it turns out, in the current budget
When Rob Smith walked into a rural Kentucky emergency department on a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 2011, he knew nothing of the distributed-reading contract put in place just a week before. This fortuitous timing led to prompt care for his aching wrist—a direct result of services from Radiology Imaging Consultants, Harvey, Illinois.
The growth of imaging-center chains was flat last year as owners absorbed a new round of reimbursement cuts in the form of higher equipment-usage rates and multiple-procedure payment discounts. Independent-chain owners primarily held their own or shed centers—and despite reports of hospital buying sprees, the chill extended to the country’s largest
Proper coding and billing have long been priorities of private and hospital-based radiology practices alike. Health-care reform and its accompanying reimbursement cuts, however, have created a need to optimize both functions. Efforts underway at practices across the country indicate that attention to detail in coding and billing can result in
How well do you really know your payors? A recent analysis for one practice turned up some very interesting revelations with operational ramifications for the provider, but this was possible only because the provider had access to the entire fee schedule of the insurance company.
To the Standard & Poor’s downgrade of US sovereign debt, the CMS proposal to slash the radiology professional component, and the stalemate in Washington, add yet another threat to solvency that has slipped nearly undetected onto the horizon—your patients.
Physicians, let’s face it: Conventional wisdom has it that we make lousy businesspeople. We’re great when it comes to the nuts and bolts of the body, but when it comes to the mechanics of finance, we’re said to be naive. Frankly, there may be some truth to this. The majority of us spent the bulk of our 20s and 30s in medical school, residency, and
Reeves and Deimler¹ portray an unvarnished picture of the business operating environment in their article, “Adaptability: The New Competitive Advantage,” in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review. Market dominance is increasingly ephemeral, with the percentage of companies falling out of the top three from year to year increasing from 2% in
Bad debt in health care resulted in $65 billion in uncollected revenue last year1—a big share of the $141 billion that all US businesses failed to collect in 2010. Although a percentage of that can be attributed to the 46 million uninsured, this might come as a surprise: At one multihospital health-care facility, balances unpaid after insurance
Anatomy, physics, and pathology are all hallmarks of the radiology education. Now, the ACR® intends to add another element: leadership training. The college announced in mid-August 2011 that it will launch the Radiology Leadership Institute (RLI) in 2012 with an inaugural invitation-only meeting, to be held July 12–14 at Northwestern University’s
It is always encouraging to see the profession’s top-tier institutions embrace the notion of helping to develop tomorrow’s radiology leaders. It not only is the right thing to do for a profession in transition, but it validates and underscores what has become, for me, a vocational mandate. I have been dedicated to the idea of supporting imaging
