Along London’s celebrated avenue of high-end medical care, Harley Street, it’s not uncommon to see sights that would make any hardened veteran of the US health care system green with envy. Though coverage through the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is provided free to all comers—and is the only option available for emergency care—NHS exists

It is a question often pondered by practice managers and others overseeing the financial aspects of an imaging enterprise: What guidelines or benchmarks do I use to determine whether to retain my in-house billing department or outsource billing? At a June 9 session at the RBMA conference in Orlando, Florida, Randal Roat, vice president of radiology

In June, an alliance of health care providers, technology vendors, and imaging organizations announced the formation of the Imaging e-Ordering Coalition, an initiative aimed at promoting health-IT–enabled clinical decision support as a means of determining the appropriateness of diagnostic imaging services. Members of the coalition include the ACR;

Editor’s note: Curtis Kauffman-Pickelle’s commentary is reprinted from the June/July 2009 issue of Radiology Business Journal.

After a false start, RBMs have come on strong, but the advent of computerized physician order entry leads some to believe there are better ways to control imaging utilization

Hurried along by economic hard times, consumerism is making an impact on diagnostic imaging choices, and savvy practices are responding

Do you remember medical imaging before PACS? There were images stored in different ways, in different places, at different times; images were lost, and images sat in stacks, waiting to be filed. Hours were spent retrieving them or searching in vain. It was frustrating and inefficient. By creating one common, shared service for image storage, PACS

In a span of one month in late 2008, the following four incidents were reported. In one case, a practice representative on the East Coast was making the rounds to shore up CT referrals. She reported that the referrals from one office had dropped dramatically because the referrer’s faxes would not go through. In another incident, a practice