Radiology Acquisitions and Change Management: RadNet’s Approach

May 12, 2012 | Deal Scan

Change is rarely easy, but Mark Stolper, executive vice president and CFO of RadNet, Inc (Los Angeles, California), says that it does not have to be painful. Communicating a workable vision and working with existing stakeholders can make all the difference because an acquisition has many moving parts. With 233... Read More »

Enhancing Service to Referrers: Progressive Radiology Case Study

May 12, 2012 | RadBrand Builder

Progressive Radiology was facing a problem familiar to many radiology practices: Hospital IT policies were interfering with its ability to deliver images and reports to referrers. Dominic Mezzanotte is director of information systems at the practice, which has 10 locations in Maryland. “We struggled with some of our top referrers,... Read More »

MRI’s Pepsi Challenge: Comparing Boreless and Wide-bore Technologies

May 12, 2012 | Productivity

Lingering doubts about the image quality generated by open-bore MRI technology have, perhaps, unfairly held up its adoption. When a pair of radiology organizations set up the equivalent of an MRI Pepsi® challenge in their respective practice environments, staff members at both locations were surprised at the response.

CMS Relaxes Rules on Ordering and Documenting Imaging Services

May 12, 2012 | Regulatory Report

Two years ago, CMS published an interim final rule¹ (with a comment period) implementing several changes to the Medicare and Medicaid programs mandated by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The interim final rule of May 2010 established new rules on obtaining and maintaining written orders for imaging... Read More »

Four Ways Radiology Groups Can Use Data in Hospital Contracting

May 12, 2012 | Revenue Track

The very nature of many radiology groups’ governance structures—highly democratic, split among multiple partners, and with each partner’s vote given equal weight—creates an unfortunate tendency toward emotional decision making. As the inside joke goes, in a radiology practice, you call 99 votes versus one vote a tie.... Read More »

Improving Imaging Quality: The Macroeconomic View

May 12, 2012 | Quality

In April, Medscape released results from its annual physician survey¹ on salary, job satisfaction, and more; among the most controversial of these results was the revelation that only 54% of those surveyed said that they would choose medicine again as a career. Stephen Pomeranz, MD, founder and CEO of... Read More »

Father-and-son Radiology

May 12, 2012 | The Big Picture

I have written in this column and spoken around the country about the perfect storm that the radiology profession is experiencing these days, and at the time of this writing, the storm clouds continue to gather. A call, last week, from industry veteran and colleague Tim Stampp, MBA, of... Read More »

Henry Ford Health System: Four Models of Physician Compensation

May 01, 2012 | NONE

In the late 1990s, when most hospitals were exiting the physician ownership game, the Henry Ford Health System (Detroit, Michigan) assumed a radical stance not only by continuing to employ its physicians, but to innovate in the area of physician compensation models.

Four such models are currently... Read More »

Building the Strategic Medical Home

May 01, 2012 | NONE

More than 400 health systems are actively engaged in researching and building the medical home, reports Lisa Bielamowicz, MD, who heads the Medical Home Project for The Advisory Board, which has identified 50 to 60 varieties of “enhanced primary care.”

This inquiry is not an idle question for the consultancy... Read More »

Strategic EMR Adoption in Dallas: 5 Lessons Learned

May 01, 2012 | NONE

A hundred years ago, the founding principle of Children’s Medical Center Dallas (CMCD), Texas, was the radical notion that children required specialized health care. Today, in a metropolitan area that is expected to experience a pediatric patient growth rate of more than double the national average, coordinating the... Read More »

Rescuing Health Care

May 01, 2012 | NONE

While the Supreme Court deliberates the constitutionality of the individual mandate among other aspects of the health care reform law, hospital and health system leaders around the country have enlisted in a more urgent undertaking: rescuing health care. Driven by the mission to serve and troubled by the calculus... Read More »

The Supersized Generation

April 28, 2012 | Final Read

A maxim in radiology, as we traverse this most uncertain health-care landscape, is that size matters. In fact, it matters a lot. Consolidation is accelerating among independent radiology groups—especially those that have, for years, deferred the tough decisions that might have given them some breathing room as more... Read More »

Radiology and the IDN: The Big Shift

April 27, 2012 | Feature

Growing your high-tech imaging business is just not the same game that it used to be, according to William Barta, corporate director of imaging services for Fairview Health Services (Minneapolis, Minnesota). “The days of patients coming to us just because they have to are gone,” he says. “It’s... Read More »

Massachusetts and Health-care Reform: The Radiology Experience

April 27, 2012 | Feature

While the fate and integrity of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) are likely to be clarified in this highly polarized presidential-election year, Massachusetts continues along a path (begun 5.5 years ago) to reform its health-care system under a law that shares many of the hallmarks of the... Read More »

Radiologist–Hospital Alignment: Destabilization, Discord, and Accord

April 27, 2012 | Feature

In March 2010, Sutter Health announced plans to sever a contract, in place for nearly a century, with Radiological Associates of Sacramento in California. Under its terms, the group had served five Sutter Health hospitals in the region. The previous year, Mercy Health Partners suddenly let lapse an equally established... Read More »

The United State of Imaging in Tacoma

April 27, 2012 | Feature

Located on the Puget Sound about 35 miles south of Seattle, Washington, the community of Tacoma and surrounding Pierce County benefit from a number of innovations that are linking local radiology providers in an uncommon collaboration. Through IT and service agreements across two competing hospital systems and two separate radiology... Read More »

Clinical Decision Support: Planting a Decision Tree in Radiology

April 27, 2012 | Feature

After a six-month period of collecting baseline data, the CMS Medicare Imaging Demonstration began on April 1, 2012. The imaging industry is watching this test closely. If the two-year demonstration shows that a computerized decision-support system can guide referring physicians to make appropriate orders for advanced imaging tests—and, at the... Read More »

Forecasting Imaging Use Under Health-care Reform

April 27, 2012 | NONE

Provided by Regents Health Resources

Regents Health Resources was formed in 1996 to assist hospitals and physicians in the development... Read More »

Families Continue to Struggle With Paying for Medical Care

April 27, 2012 | Priors

For January through June 2011, one-third of people in the United States were members of families having difficulties paying for medical care, according to a March 2012 report.¹ One in five people was in a family having problems paying medical bills, one in four was in a family paying medical... Read More »

Why Radiologists Should Tweet, Blog, and Exploit Social Media

April 27, 2012 | Priors

Since the passage of the DRA, and through subsequent hits to reimbursement for imaging, one question has been perennial in the radiology community: How can radiologists raise their profile with patients without sacrificing productivity (or profitability)? John A. Patti, MD, chair of the ACR® board of chancellors, suggests that... Read More »

ACE: Adventures in Bundled Payment

April 27, 2012 | Priors

With a bundled-payment pilot program instituted by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act set to begin in 2013, it is interesting (and perhaps instructive) to look at a three-year CMS project nearing its endpoint—the Acute Care Episode (ACE) Demonstration1 for orthopedic and cardiovascular surgery—through the eyes of... Read More »

MU2: Value Proposition for Radiology

April 27, 2012 | Priors

On March 7, 2012, the proposed rule¹ governing stage 2 of the CMS incentive program for electronic health records (EHRs) and the 2014 EHR certification criteria² were published to generally favorable reviews from organized radiology. Mike Peters, director of legislative and regulatory affairs for the ACR®, explains why the ACR has... Read More »

Vertigo

April 27, 2012 | Adview

No matter how good your service is or how expert and reliable the care, if someone isn’t taking care of the back of the house, health care is out of business. I learned that the hard way when my wonderful dentist (who used to tell her elderly clients... Read More »

CT Dose Reporting in California

April 27, 2012 | The Bottom Line

Many of the accidents that spurred press coverage of CT overdoses in recent years occurred in California. This led to enactment of the state’s SB 1237 (and subsequent cleanup legislation), which will take effect on July 1, 2012. The law’s basic provisions are that the so-called CT dose—the volumetric... Read More »

Completing the MRI Portfolio: Summa Health System

April 15, 2012 | RadBrand Builder

Summa Health System (Akron, Ohio), one of the largest health-care networks in the state, was facing a difficulty common to organizations that provide imaging for bariatric patients: the 0.3T open MRI system at its Summa Health Center at White Pond, to which many of these patients had to be... Read More »