In what is believed to be Massachusetts’s largest medical malpractice award this year, a Boston jury awarded $16.7 million to the daughter of a Boston woman whose lung cancer was missed on a chest x-ray.

Pittsburgh-based Foundation Radiology raised $2.5 million from investors, reports the Pittsburgh Business Times.

Shortly after the new business rules governing electronic funds transfer (EFT) transactions went into effect on January 1, Robert Tennant, MGMA senior policy advisor, began to ask for a show of hands when he spoke to physician groups to get a sense of how many physicians were receiving EFT payment via virtual credit card.

At the most recent meeting of the Radiology Business Management Association in Charlotte, a new model for independent group practice collaboration was proposed to practices around the country. The model allows independent practices to succeed and is an alternative to the traditional radiology group alignment models of merger, acquisition, or outright takeover by a hospital or a private equity group. These collaborations can take different forms, but they share the same underlying goals: gaining the necessary resources to fulfill the needs of their primary clients—hospitals, payors and patients—inclusive of delivering meaningful information and decision support.

Radiology practices have long sought a solution to the consolidation occurring in their marketplaces, as well as the commoditization happening in their midst. The fundamental problem is delivering ever-higher levels of service and quality with diminished resources.

The team from the Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute, led by radiologist Richard Duszak, Jr., MD, made an interesting inquiry into the quantity and nature of uncompensated imaging studies provided to emergency department (ED) patients, the results of which are published in the June issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

More than 28 percent of services rendered by radiologists to emergency department (ED) patients were uncompensated to the tune of a mean $2,584 per month per radiologist, according to a study published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

August 10-13, 2014Washington, DC