In a December 2 session at RSNA 2009 in Chicago, Illinois, on using next-generation health care IT to improve radiology, David Avrin, MD, PhD, radiologist at the University of California–San Francisco Medical Center, opened with a comment made to him by one of his hospital administrators: “Images these days are so clear that even I can read them.”

In urging radiologists to adopt a new focus on quality improvement, RSNA outgoing president Gary Becker, MD, outlines the steps necessary to achieve this goal and calls informatics integral to the process. “As we enter the era of personalized medicine and value-based purchasing in medicine, delivery of the highest quality, most efficient care will

Ramin Khorasani, MD

When the 16 hospitals of the Western North Carolina Health Network (WNCHN) sat down to create a federated model for a health information exchange (HIE) four years ago, they could find no examples of unaffiliated institutions sharing health data, so WNCHN essentially began with a tabula rasa.

On October 6, 2009, four physicians gathered in Stamford, Connecticut, to participate in a discussion moderated by Cheryl Proval, Radinformatics.com editorial director.

The nation’s hospitals eluded a $1 billion pay cut on October 1, when the 2010 Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) went into effect, because CMS chose not to include a negative 1.9% update for payments to hospitals as originally proposed. On the other hand, imaging-technology owners in the freestanding outpatient and in-office settings are

Growth in outpatient advanced imaging has declined significantly from its peak in 2004. At that time, outpatient CT and MRI exam volumes were growing at approximately 10% each per year. From 2009 to 2013, however, imaging experts at The Advisory Board Co, Washington, DC, estimate that growth for these modalities will slow to approximately 5%

A recent New Yorker article¹ shone a harsh light on the city of McAllen, Texas, where Medicare data suggest that health care costs are nearly twice as high as the national average. Garnering less attention was the example that the author (surgeon Atul Gawande, MD, MPH) gave of a community where health care delivery functions efficiently and