The most recent Sentinel Event Alert¹ issued by the Joint Commission formally put the medical world on notice that the expanding use of diagnostic imaging will require more stringent oversight to ensure patient safety. Whether that oversight will be self-imposed or enforced from without, the Joint Commission recommends that practitioners be held to

The roles of the physician leader and the administrative leader are evolving in new ways. Historically, the physician leader devoted extra time to committees, to being the spokesperson for the medical group, and to chairing meetings. With complexity increasing and change rampant throughout health care, organizational leadership needs are growing.

I understand that the government does not want to spend money on an imaging examination that is unnecessary. As a fiscal conservative, I have an inherent distaste for waste and actively resent the idea of my tax dollars being spent on anything that isn’t necessary. When it comes to finding opportunities to reduce health-care spending, however, it

Two members of the U.S. House of Representatives are urging President Obama’s supercommittee to eliminate the sustainable growth rate (SGR).

Nuclear medicine/SPECT utilization is relatively flat and trending slightly downward, with the volume of procedures performed having decreased by an average of approximately 0.5% per year between 2007 and 2010. Last year, an estimated 17.0 million nuclear medicine procedures were performed on SPECT or SPECT/CT cameras in the U.S., at 7,230 hospital

A recent report published by the Institute for Health Technology Transformation in New York City, New York and Washington, D.C. outlines a myriad of changes to occur under the accountable care organization (ACO) model.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday awarded $2 million to support the establishment of two regional Centers of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Working toward the goal of encouraging participation in the Medicare Shared Savings Program and the Advance Payment Initiative, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Office of Inspector General (OIG), and the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) last Thursday issued an interim final rule that sets forth waivers to the