No matter what one thinks about health-care reforms as they are currently being revealed in their entirety, implicit within any future integrated delivery system (accountable-care organization) is the understanding that turf lines will be blurred and that patient care will be much more of a team effort than one in which silos of specialists carve

By observing the quantity and quality of informatics innovation emerging from a radiology department, it is possible to identify those institutions that are nurturing the next wave of informaticists in radiology. One beacon is the University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS) in Philadelphia, where R. Nick Bryan, MD, PhD, is chair of radiology.

After government officials revised the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act to include hospital-based physicians practicing in outpatient settings, radiology practices began scrambling to determine what it will mean to them. IT adjustments take time and money, and practices waiting for stage 2 meaningful-use

Imaging is increasingly pervasive in modern medicine; according to a 2011 study¹ published in Radiology, the use of CT scans in emergency-department visits has risen 16% per year since 1995, and the report estimated that the modality could have been used in 20% of emergency-department visits in 2011. Remarkably little research has been performed to

Attestation for stage 1 meaningful use is underway in radiology, and expectations are rising about the ability of IT to reduce cost and increase quality in health care. In separate interviews with Radiology Business Journal, Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, national coordinator for health IT, and Todd Park, CTO for the US DHHS, clarify their

The upside to Berwick being shown the door in Washington is the pleasure to be had in reading his first major talk¹ since leaving the office of CMS administrator on December 2, 2011. The occasion was the 23rd Annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, held in Orlando, Florida. Berwick

The pleas of the American Medical Association and other physician groups have not fallen on deaf ears. Yesterday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen G. Sebelius announced that HHS will postpone the deadline for health care providers' compliance with International Classification of Diseases, 10th Edition diagnosis and procedure codes (ICD

Congress quickly passed a bill today that freezes physician pay under Medicare until the end of the year, effectively avoiding a nearly 30% cut under the SGR formula that was scheduled to take place in March. The SGR fix is tied to two larger measures in the bill — extensions to the payroll tax break and unemployment insurance — which virtually