Patient satisfaction is often misunderstood by health-care providers, according to William R. Johnson, CRA, MBA, RT, system director of patient experience with Memorial Health System (Springfield, Illinois). In Los Angeles, California, on April 10, at the 2013 spring meeting of AHRA: The Association for Medical Imaging Management, he presented “Patient Satisfaction: What It Isn’t, What It Is, and How to Do It Better.” He says, “It’s all about the patients’ experience of how they were treated as human beings. It’s about their perceptions of the caring they received during their clinical journeys.”

When the hospital is the buying party in an imaging joint venture, there are four potential issues that could terminate the transaction, all of which stem from due diligence. These issues include one or both parties failing to understand the distinction between fair market value and strategic value, conflicts surrounding how professional payments are determined after the transaction, collection irregularities or other problems with revenue recognition, and management and governance issues for the newly joint-ventured or acquired imaging center. All four of these transaction deal-breakers, however, can be avoided through understanding, preparation, commitment to communication, and setting expectations.

“Why make your RIS into an electronic health record (EHR) just to satisfy meaningful use?” David Avrin, MD, PhD, asks. It is a question that Avrin, professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at the University of California–San Francisco, has been asking (in one form or another) since the government’s program to provide incentives for the use of health IT launched. “There are people who have taken feeds from various systems into their modular-certified RIS platforms,” he continues, “and they have HL7 feeds coming in from every direction. Even though a RIS vendor may have the best intentions in creating a modular system, you’re still responsible for the other components.”

Here’s a confession: Though a bit of a snob about most of what’s on television these days, I’m obsessed with AMC’s “Mad Men.” I’ve watched every episode more than once, analyzing each for hidden meanings and recurring themes; I even read recaps online in case there’s anything I missed. An oft-repeated truism on the show, trotted out when its ad executives are dealing with clients in difficult situations, is: If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation. I wonder, sometimes, what the creative geniuses of the fictional ad agencies of “Mad Men” would make of imaging’s biggest current problem.

Hackensack University Medical Center (HUMC) in Bergen County, NJ, and Mount Desert Island Hospital in Bar Harbor, Maine, won for their excellence on multiple levels and superior patient care

An American Society of Nuclear Cardiology (ASNC) official spoke in favor of appropriate use criteria to reduce inappropriate cardiac imaging in his testimony to the U.S. House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee

Rather than a “reboot” of the meaningful use incentive program — as six Republican Senators asked for last month — the program just needs more time, say executives at the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives

San Diego-based Visage Imaging Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Pro Medicus Ltd. ,has signed a five-year agreement with vRad to implement the Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform