Quality

The focus of quality improvement in healthcare is to bolster performance and processes related to diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Leaders in this space also ensure the proper selection of imaging exams and procedures, and monitor the safety of services, among other duties. Reimbursement programs such as the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) utilize financial incentives to improve quality. This also includes setting and maintaining care quality initiatives, such as the requirements set by the Joint Commission.

A Merger Born of Data Analysis

The merger/acquisition market is heating up in radiology. Over the past few months, several mergers of large practices have created even larger ones, and other groups are likely to be considering similar moves. While entering into a merger agreement has its benefits, though, not all potential partners are entirely suited for each other. Moreover,

An IPA Leverages the Benefits of Information Sharing

It has long been said that information is power, and if that is the case, actionable information is even more powerful. For members of independent physician networks, such data are the linchpin in achieving alignment with hospitals, leveraging relationships, attaining preferred status with payors, and more.

Closing the Charge-Capture Gap

Full charge-capture has become a must for today’s radiology practices. In addition to affording the obvious advantages of improved cash flow and lost-income recovery, full charge-capture offers providers access to a more complete—and therefore, more accurate—complement of data for use in negotiating with hospitals and payors, assessing physician

The Road to Actionable Information:Q & A with Robert J. Kebbekus

Radiology practices interface with many disparate information systems that produce data, but generating meaningful reports that pull information from all of those systems—PACS, RIS, billing, and reporting—is too cumbersome to be done with any regularity. As payors begin to link reimbursement to outcomes and episodes of care replace individual

Business Intelligence Packs A Punch With Payors

Improvement of commercial-payor contracts can result in significant revenue gains and better contracts for medical groups, with radiology practices among them. Successfully negotiating such deals, however—and optimizing them to include financial dividends—necessitates that actionable business intelligence be brought to the bargaining table.

Betting Long: Technology Investment Trumps Partners’ Income Boost

Many radiology-practice leaders will, at one juncture or another, pursue business directions intended to increase partners’ incomes. While nothing is inherently wrong with this approach, following an alternate route that involves investing in technology to position the practice for greater income in the future—and leveraging data to justify and

A Conversation With Douglas G. Smith: The Business-intelligence Imperative

Today, more than ever, imaging providers must harness the power of actionable business intelligence in all aspects of their operations, including the communication of quantifiable outcomes to payors, client hospitals, referrers, and patients. Such is the strategy to be explored in each issue of RadAnalytics, under the MedAnalytix.com umbrella.

Driven by Data: Instinct Takes a Back Seat to Metrics

In early 2009, physician and business leaders of Advanced Medical Imaging Consultants, PC, Fort Collins, Colorado, found themselves wrestling with the decision of whether to add a new site of service at a rural hospital. Instinct told them that the practice was up for the challenge: With 27 radiologists and 17 staff members (including full-time

Around the web

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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.