Business Intelligence

Providers utilize business intelligence to monitor referral patterns and collaborate with clinicians who order their services. Such analytics tools have also been deployed in the specialty to improve productivity, track patient satisfaction and bolster quality.

7 Staff Management Steps to Improve Safety and Quality Issues

A new ASRT white paper sounds a warning about technologist training and staffing challenges in an era of shrinking imaging reimbursement and rapid technological change, but also offers ways to correct these issues

Cook Medical Launches Fully-Retractable Embolization Coil

New Orleans-based Cook Medical took the opportunity of the SIR meeting to introduce its new fully-retractable .035 inch embolization coil for peripheral arterial and venous embolization

DR Systems Issued New Patent

The patent covers a system for monitoring the portions of a medical image displayed at full resolution and reducing the chance of a missing an abnormality in the image due to the viewer examining a portion of the image at a different resolution or other display parameter.

Eli Lilly to Buy Siemens’ Alzheimer's Imaging Agents

Eli Lilly, the maker of the first FDA-approved Alzheimer's imaging agent, Amyvid, is acquiring two imaging agents developed by Siemens that make brain deposits of tau visible. Amyvid targets amyloid plaques

New Imaging Technique Can Distinguish Between Benign and Malignant Prostate Tissue

The technique pairs laser optics with ultrasound imaging to create multispectral photoacoustic imaging that reliably sorted malignant prostate tissue samples from benign samples

Neiman Institute to Fund 6 Studies Examining Imaging’s Value

The studies will help fulfill the Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute's mission of creating a fuller evidence-based picture of the role of radiology in evolving health care delivery and payment models

JAMA Study Highlights Health Care's Perverse Incentives

A paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association is likely to fuel the movement towards value-based purchasing in health care. In a study of 34,000 surgeries performed at Dallas-based hospital network Texas Health, researchers found that surgeries with complications generate twice the revenue of surgeries without complications, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

GOP Senators Issue Report on HITECH Problems

The Republican senators say that so far the government has gotten a poor return on the billions it has invested in electronic health record (EHR) “meaningful use” incentives

Around the web

The nuclear imaging isotope shortage of molybdenum-99 may be over now that the sidelined reactor is restarting. ASNC's president says PET and new SPECT technologies helped cardiac imaging labs better weather the storm.

CMS has more than doubled the CCTA payment rate from $175 to $357.13. The move, expected to have a significant impact on the utilization of cardiac CT, received immediate praise from imaging specialists.

The all-in-one Omni Legend PET/CT scanner is now being manufactured in a new production facility in Waukesha, Wisconsin.