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

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