Alignment increasingly occupies the thoughts of health-care stakeholders—insurers, legislators, and regulators, but especially hospitals and physician groups. Because alignment sets the stage for service and quality improvements, as well as for the implementation of cost-control mechanisms, the interest is warranted. Hospitals have sought to employ both primary-care and specialty physician practices for the ability to impose quality and cost uniformity through top-down policies, procedures, and cultural mandates.

Persistent decreases in outpatient imaging reimbursement and a dramatic decline in volume finally took their toll on the imaging-center market, with a resulting 3.65% decline in the total number of freestanding outpatient imaging centers. This is the first contraction since the dip that followed the stock-market crash in 2009.

Today’s radiology dashboards let you know how your department or practice is running. They chart patient flow; report-turnaround times; critical-results reporting; and dozens of other data points that reflect cost, efficiency, productivity, and (sometimes) effectiveness. One of the primary goals of these dashboards is to support quality improvement, as CMS and other payors begin to link payment to performance—and to define performance using quality measurements.

When hospital executives express dissatisfaction with professional radiology services, local radiology practices should put on their nimble-response shoes and communicate. If they don’t, national teleradiology companies will, and the experience at Stamford Hospital in Connecticut is a case in point.

As Ezequiel Silva III, MD, makes perfectly clear in his guest editorial in this issue, the entire continuum of radiology delivery services is inches away from getting slammed—again. The root of radiology’s latest problem is in a 2007 report¹ (based on data of an even earlier vintage) from RTI International, LLC, that recommends separate cost centers for MRI and CT.

According to the leaders of the national teleradiology partnership Direct Radiology, LLC, the lawsuit Virtual Radiologic (vRad) and NightHawk Radiology Services filed alleging patent infringement is unfounded and meant to intimidate competitors rather than protect patent rights

The National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) has completed its Manufacturer Disclosure Statement for Medical Device Security (MDS2) – 2013 Standard, and the changes earned the support of not only its own Medical Imaging & Technology Alliance (MITA) division, but also the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)

Michael W. Ferro, Jr., chairman and board member for Chicago-based Merge Healthcare Inc., has resigned after another poor quarter for the company