After consulting for the practice for several years, two years ago, Robert Cannistra joined Radiologic Associates PC (Middletown, New York) as its director of IT. Like many in the informatics field, Cannistra says, he was surprised by the unique challenges that health-care providers face when he first began consulting for hospitals and health-care

As a neuroradiologist, Ray Kirk, MD, president of Greater Houston Radiology Associates (GHRA) in Texas, often considers both the financial and clinical futures of the specialty. “Where radiology is today,” he says, “there is a need to make ourselves more relevant to the patient-care process in the eyes of our customers—hospitals, referring

With radiology practices increasingly facing the imperative to function as businesses, dashboarding has become a favorite buzzword—but what does it really mean? It is our contention, at Integrated Medical Partners, that dashboarding is a widely misunderstood concept. A practice’s business intelligence is about much more than the visually pleasing

Geraldine McGinty, MD, MBA, chair of the ACR® Commission on Economics, explores the difference between ACR and payor positions on quality.

A decade ago, the executive team of Virginia Mason Hospital and Medical Center (VMHMC) in Seattle, Washington, flew to Japan for training in the Toyota Production System (TPS), a continuous–process-improvement method pioneered by the automobile manufacturer. Lucy Glenn, MD, chair of VMHMC’s radiology department, says, “We began to understand how

The imaging informaticists, physicists, physicians, and vendors’ representatives who gathered at the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine regional meeting, Practical Imaging Informatics, in Long Beach, California, on March 22, 2012, didn’t arrive in covered wagons, but they did have much in common with the state’s pioneer settlers. On

Radiology-practice alignment with hospitals and health systems has never been a simple proposition, and recent years have seen the severance of long-standing ties between hospitals and the practices that served them. Simultaneously, however, conditions in the US health-care market have made alignment between the two parties a more promising

Multiple factors have coalesced recently to create the ideal environment for improved radiology group–hospital alignment, including regulatory upheavals, economic pressure, and changes in reimbursement. The alignment pressures have resulted in much discussion concerning group consolidation. Frequently, this consolidation takes one of three forms: