Ernest Glad, president of Cortell Health, Dallas, Texas, sees the 2007 CMS restructuring of the DRGs used in the inpatient prospective-payment system as an opportunity that many hospitals are currently squandering. The restructuring adjusts DRG weights based on the severity of a patient’s condition to improve the system’s ability to account for the

After weathering last fall’s fiscal catastrophe, many hospital CFOs now find themselves in Bert Zimmerli’s position. Though Zimmerli is senior vice president and CFO of the only health care system in the country to receive the highest credit rating from both Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services and Moody’s Investors Service, he says that the

It was the contract termination heard ‘round the world when Florida Radiology Associates (FRA) ended its 40-year relationship with Florida Hospital last year. Negotiation of a new contract barely got off the ground before the hospital formed its own in-house radiology group, poaching the majority of FRA’s staff. The incident raised eyebrows in the

Ever since digital imaging liberated radiologists from the site of image acquisition, radiology practices have labored to patch together distributed reading solutions that would efficiently meet the needs of multiple clients, balance workflow, and enable subspecialization.

The answer to that question may appear obvious to imaging informatics professionals, but a study released earlier this year by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) disputed the ability of health informatics to reduce health care cost. Now, all of us in radiology have seen the ability of informatics to reduce imaging costs within the radiology

When Hawaii Health Systems Corp (HHSC), Honolulu, began shopping for a PACS solution for three of its five island regions, newly hired CIO Money Atwal had a few unique issues to take into consideration. Though multisite PACS configurations are increasingly commonplace, most don’t have to cross water in order to work. Atwal needed a solution that

The US Navy deployed its first PACS—a military-specified system with limited functionality—in 1996. Since then, the Navy has operated multiple PACS from a variety of vendors, all selected through a contracting process monitored by the US Department of Defense (DoD). “Our purchasing process enables us always to select the best of breed,” Edwin Doorn

The server requirements of any modern hospital are daunting; the back-end processing power necessary to operate multiple health information systems across an enterprise of any size requires an ever-shifting configuration of blades, proxies, failover systems, and disaster-recovery solutions. It’s no wonder, then, that a five-hospital system with 2