I read your article, “Finger in the Wind,”¹ with interest.

The ACR is seeking volunteer practices to help the college test quality measures—including several PQRI measures—previously developed in collaboration with the American Medical Association/Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement (PCPI).

It is not accuracy of interpretations, or contrast-media administration, or wrong-site surgeries, or infection control in the MRI suite. No, the specialty’s number-one safety issue is radiation exposure, subject of this month’s cover story. In a sadly ironic twist of fate, the very source of the profession’s power of inquiry has become its Achilles

In 2008, when Congress passed the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act (MIPPA), the January 2012 accreditation deadline for providers of advanced imaging seemed distant, but it’s near enough to call for action now. For those advanced diagnostic imaging services (ADIS) providers still unaccredited, the choices available in

Within the past 10 years, the topic of physician-performance benchmarking has progressed from contentious to being one on which entire meetings in the radiology community are based. Some industry analysts say that this evolution has occurred because measuring physician performance has become a necessity, in today’s health-care environment, due to

Few processes in radiology are as dreaded as switching from a legacy PACS to a newer replacement. Often approached only when the former PACS is on its last legs, the transition between systems requires diligent selection from an ever-widening field of solutions, lengthy migration of complex (and sometimes flawed) data, and retraining of all

It seems clear that the number of US imaging centers has stopped expanding, and that imaging-center chains are no longer as eager to snap up as many centers as possible. This is not bad news, however. Procedural volumes per imaging center are growing—so the combination of greater demand for imaging and fewer centers competing for those referrals

Nationwide cumulative-dose indices, warning flags in electronic medical records (EMRs), and electronic imaging-history smart cards: All these are being called for to protect patients from excessive radiation exposure. The real advances on this hot-button issue for radiology, however, are taking place at the health-facility level, one patient at a