Plenty remains unknowable about the incipient impact of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA), but the act does stand to affect imaging providers, specifically through its compliance, fraud, and payment provisions, many of which have already taken effect or will take effect in the near future.

At Shields Health Care Group (SHCG), an outpatient high-end imaging provider headquartered in Quincy, Massachusetts, staying ahead of the technology curve has been a clearly defined business initiative from the beginning. It is paying off handsomely. According to the company, one in every three MRI patients in the state is imaged at an SHCG center.

As a journalism and media student in the early 1970s, I was exposed to what was just then emerging as an entirely new way of aligning the creators of information with those who were hungry to receive it. The selection and nurturing of the media outlets and conduits of critically important information into highly tailored segments were then brand

Much of the evidence said to support the theory that radiology subspecialists make fewer mistakes than their generalist colleagues is anecdotal. The content of some peer-reviewed papers, however, appears to lend more credence to the theory.

The question of whether general radiology is on the path to obsolescence has sparked considerable debate in recent years, with much of the controversy centered on the contention that subspecialty radiologists are responsible for fewer errors than their generalist counterparts. Whether this contention is true or not, the trend toward

A buoyant tour of health-care reform greeted radiologists who gathered at the annual American Roentgen Ray Society meeting for the Caldwell Lecture, delivered by Benjamin K. Chu, MD, on May 3, 2010, in San Diego, California. If Chu seemed unusually upbeat, for a physician, about health-care reform, it might have been because the internist also is

Terry Owen is senior vice president of Florida Hospital in Orlando. He says, “We think the old days of fee for service, the high-water mark, are behind us.” What’s coming is some permutation of the accountable-care organization (ACO), with bundling of payment for services and outcomes-driven treatment. “If we get bundled pay for disease groups,

Your hospital just installed a new multidetector CT (MDCT) scanner of 64 slices or more, and your emergency-department physicians are clamoring for a 24/7 coronary CT angiography (CCTA) service; now what?