As the deadline inches closer, radiology providers around the country are scrambling to meet new CMS accreditation requirements for MRI, CT, and nuclear medicine. By mandate of the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act (MIPPA), in order to receive Medicare reimbursement for these modalities, imaging centers must be accredited by the

It’s no surprise that so many provider organizations threw their weight behind the recently passed health-reform bill. In 2009, 72% of hospitals reported increases in uncompensated care.¹ The vast majority also reported decreases in both elective procedures and inpatient admissions, difficulty acquiring capital, and moratoria on capital projects

If Dan Hesse had told you, 25 years ago, that you’d be reviewing studies, monitoring patients, and communicating with referrers using Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone, you would have thought him delirious. With today’s smart phones in play, the pitch from Sprint’s CEO did not sound like science fiction.

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), with 20 affiliated hospitals and 30 imaging centers in western Pennsylvania, could be seen as ground zero in the effort to digitize medicine. From its innovative financial and development partnership with IBM to a recently announced pact with Google to develop a personal electronic health record

The advent of Medicare administrative contractors has emphasized the importance of ensuring that charge capture is consistent and accurate for the professional and technical components of care. This affects many areas, but arguably, none more greatly than outpatient diagnostic and interventional-radiology services. Hospitals and physicians

The question of how to engage physicians in hospital quality initiatives “is one that many organizations are grappling with,” according to Albert Bothe, MD, chief quality officer for Geisinger Health System, Danville, Pennsylvania. He believes that any commitment to quality must start at the top, with leaders demonstrating their commitment to

At NYU Langone Medical Center (NYULMC), New York, New York, even though the radiology department’s billing office adheres to the principle of a cross-trained staff pool, it practices the explicit division of labor: Coders do nothing but code, payment posters post payments, claims processors specialize in making sure exams are coded and processed

Each year, nearly 800,000 people in the United States suffer strokes, making cerebrovascular disease the nation’s third leading cause of death (behind heart disease and cancer). Virtually all of these patients end up in hospital emergency departments, where the ability to distinguish between ischemic strokes and the less common hemorrhagic strokes