When Jane Wheatley, CEO of Taylor Regional Hospital, Campbellsville, Kentucky, needed to make a decision regarding her facility’s handling of radiology services, she had two imperatives in mind: cost and quality. After the hospital’s radiology group disbanded in the early 2000s, the 90-bed acute care center contracted with an outside radiology

Health care futurist and consultant Jeff Bauer, PhD, coauthor of the book Paradox and Imperatives in Health Care: How Efficiency, Effectiveness, and E-Transformation Can Conquer Waste and Optimize Quality (Productivity Press, 2007), has raised eyebrows by suggesting that meaningful health care reform faces tough odds on Capitol Hill. He spoke with

Sharing images across any health care enterprise represents a challenge, but doing so across the Pacific Rim was the dilemma faced in 2003 by the US Air Force. Taking up this challenge were Lt Col Grant Tibbetts, MD, now radiology consultant to the surgeon general, and Tom Lewis, the director of the Air Force PACS Office. “The largest hospital in

Scarce capital, these days, poses a serious threat to imaging enterprises hoping to see even modest growth. Blame the economy if you will, but there are any number of other contributing factors, including the rapid commoditization of equipment maintenance, punishing tax rates, investment-portfolio losses, and the hold that regulations and legal

In July 2008, Congress passed the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act (MIPPA), which, among other provisions, mandated that all outpatient providers of advanced diagnostic imaging services be accredited by a CMS-designated body by January 1, 2012, in order to receive Medicare reimbursement for the technical component of an exam.

Friendly competition has developed among the five radiologists of Capital Imaging Associates, Albany, New York, to the benefit of referrers (and, potentially, to patient care). Six months ago, the group implemented an RVU-based system for productivity tracking, which has allowed the physicians to gain awareness of their individual caseloads and how

I just finished reading the new book about last year’s financial near meltdown, Too Big to Fail (Viking, 2009), by Andrew Ross Sorkin. The book’s several hundred pages of behind-the-scenes narrative leading up to and immediately following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 were instructive on several levels for those of us trying to

Since the dawn of the DRA at the close of 2005, health care observers have predicted a follow-on DRA II. It appears that this prediction will come to pass shortly after the clock strikes midnight on December 31.