Health care may rank a distant second to the economy and jobs when it comes to issues on which voters would like lawmakers and Presidential candidates to focus, but Americans generally are not confident that Congress and private insurers can keep Medicare financially sound

Editor Cheryl Proval and I had the privilege of moderating a very interesting and animated session at the recent RBMA meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. It was a face-to-face panel discussion with the CEOs of each of the five radiology benefit management (RBM) companies. Anticipation built during the conference, and the attendees were definitely

Medical billing is the process of translating a physician’s work into reimbursable language understood by governmental and private third-party payors. The billing process must start with the physician’s documentation of patient encounters, which forms the basis for billing. The physician’s documentation is then translated into a CPT® code

In recent years, interventional radiologists have had an easier time with the long-standing challenge of impressing their diagnostic colleagues with the intangible worth of a clinical interventional-radiology service. A radiology practice with clinical feet on the street has at least a fighting chance of outrunning a remote teleradiology service.

By the nature of their subspecialty, interventional radiologists are enamored of innovations that engender emerging minimally invasive therapies, and the 2011 annual meeting of the Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) in Chicago, Illinois, did not disappoint. Interventional-radiology researchers reported promising outcomes from clinical trials

When Radiology Business Journal was founded four years ago, it was with the understanding that IT represented not just the platform for image interpretation, exchange, and archiving, but also a broad foundation for practice operations, communications, and financial analysis. Earlier this year (and with that in mind), we approached the Society for

Radiology first felt the effects of the bundling initiative launched by CMS in 2010, with the creation of combined CPT® codes for myocardial perfusion, wall motion, and ejection fraction (78451–78454); arteriovenous shunt dialysis-catheter procedures, along with radiological supervision and interpretation (36147 and 36148); and facet-joint

Medicare is looking for misvalued imaging codes—and it has already found several for which it has reduced payment. Its efforts have dismayed radiologists. Facing more revenue losses from CMS and the private insurers that follow in the agency’s footprints, radiologists feel targeted and, as a specialty, misvalued themselves.