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.

On June 7, 2011, at the Annual Summit of the RBMA in New Orleans, Louisiana, four CEOs and one senior leader—representing all five radiology benefit management (RBM) companies—participated in a panel discussion during a general session, “Face to Face With RBM CEOs: Shaping the Dialogue for Imaging’s New Realities.” Look for coverage of that session

In his preview¹ in Health Affairs of the impending data deluge scheduled to begin with the transition to ICD-10 on October 1, 2013, Harris Meyer explains that the international disease-classification system dates back to 1763, when—in an act of altruism toward his fellow physicians—Francois Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix (1706–1767) published a

There is bad news and good news for radiology, when it comes to meeting meaningful-use requirements, according to Keith Dreyer, DO, PhD, vice chair of radiology computing and information sciences at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. In the Dwyer Lecture, “Meaningful Use in Medical Imaging: New Technologies for US Healthcare Reform,”

Radiology’s existing coding structure is undergoing a dramatic transformation, which is the product of numerous code screens being used by CMS and the RVS Update Committee to identify potentially misvalued services. The application of these code screens often results in the conversion of old codes to new codes. The conversion to new codes has