Rural health networks nationwide will receive more than $11.9 million to support their adoption of health information technology (HIT) and certified electronic health records (EHR), the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) announced last Friday.The funding is also intended to assist participating eligible providers of these rural health

It is always encouraging to see the profession’s top-tier institutions embrace the notion of helping to develop tomorrow’s radiology leaders. It not only is the right thing to do for a profession in transition, but it validates and underscores what has become, for me, a vocational mandate. I have been dedicated to the idea of supporting imaging

How well do you really know your payors? A recent analysis for one practice turned up some very interesting revelations with operational ramifications for the provider, but this was possible only because the provider had access to the entire fee schedule of the insurance company.

Proper coding and billing have long been priorities of private and hospital-based radiology practices alike. Health-care reform and its accompanying reimbursement cuts, however, have created a need to optimize both functions. Efforts underway at practices across the country indicate that attention to detail in coding and billing can result in

When Rob Smith walked into a rural Kentucky emergency department on a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 2011, he knew nothing of the distributed-reading contract put in place just a week before. This fortuitous timing led to prompt care for his aching wrist—a direct result of services from Radiology Imaging Consultants, Harvey, Illinois.

Radiology might become the first medical specialty to face Medicare’s mythical death panel. If the specialty keeps taking hits, it might die, critics of proposed Medicare reimbursement cuts warn. The death-panel idea began as a political slur, meant to tar advocates of expense reduction for end-of-life care. As it turns out, in the current budget

Bad debt in health care resulted in $65 billion in uncollected revenue last year1—a big share of the $141 billion that all US businesses failed to collect in 2010. Although a percentage of that can be attributed to the 46 million uninsured, this might come as a surprise: At one multihospital health-care facility, balances unpaid after insurance