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:

The specifics of how the traditional radiology practice model will fit with the emerging paradigm of the accountable-care organization (ACO) remain unclear, but it is clear that radiologists should be thinking about how to bend the cost and quality curves, according to Ted Kerner, MD, CEO of Triad Radiology Associates (Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Much has been said and written in anticipation of new payment models like the accountable-care organization (ACO), but one consideration that often falls by the wayside, in all the talk of risk and reward, is informatics, Tom Smith says. Smith is CIO of Triad Radiology Associates (Winston-Salem, North Carolina). “With ACOs still in the early stages

The stated aims of accountable-care organizations (ACOs) mirror the triple aim proposed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (Cambridge, Massachusetts), and both sets of goals have one common thrust: placing the patient at the center of the health-care continuum. As Linda Skarzynski, CFO for Triad Radiology Associates (Winston-Salem, North