Just about everyone in the healthcare world knows that the Supreme Court will take up the controversial Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) sometime in March 2012, with a decision scheduled for June.
The issues at stake, however, are less well-known. Here is a very brief summary of the Supreme Court documents that show what the justices have to wrestle with (in no particular order):
A comprehensive radiology information system (RIS) can make a medical imaging workplace much more efficient.
That’s one of the conclusions of Ramin Khorasani, a radiologist from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, in a recent Journal of the American College of Radiology article.
Khorasani argues that articulating well thought-out imaging protocols can reduce unnecessary follow-up medical imaging by facilitating improvement in initial diagnoses. One key to good protocols, he says, is good IT – and that includes an RIS.
Khorasani makes a few specific recommendations for improving protocols:
$319 billion. That’s how much could be saved on healthcare costs if the government acted on Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association’s (BCBSA) recent recommendations.
The problem: medical imaging would get squeezed.
BCBSA’s recommendations follow a by-now familiar pattern: 1) Replace fee-for-service reimbursement with outcome-based reimbursement, 2) Invest in primary care, and 3) Invest in preventative care.
The details, however, bring out the trouble for medical imaging. The recommendations use a partnership between Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield and a radiology benefit management company as a model. The partnership relied on prior authorization from the benefit management to reduce the use of medical imaging.
The opening sentence of Wikipedia’s “Echocardiography” entry is “Not to be confused with electrocardiography.”
That’s for sure.
Echocardiography is a cardiac ultrasound that produces 2D or, increasingly, 3D real-time images of a heart. Moreover, an echocardiogram can analyze valve function, blood flow in and out of the heart, “communications” between the left and right sides of the heart, and other cardiac functions.
Electrocardiography, on the other hand, measures the electrical activity of the heart over a period of time.
Both procedures are important in modern-day cardiac care, but echocardiography is increasingly being used in emergency rooms to quickly assess patients experiencing some form of cardiac distress.
So you like X-rays, MRIs, and radiology information systems. And you’re wondering where you should go for that radiology residency.
We may be able to help.
With a frank admission that the “ranking” process is inherently subjective, we’ve drawn up a list of five medical schools that offer outstanding radiology training. Our selection was based on various rankings from the popular press (like U.S. News) and professional organizations and on numbers such as acceptance rates and publications. We also tried to highlight schools from around the U.S.
Tomorrow’s medical imaging practice will probably look much different from today’s. And it’s all because of economics.
That’s the conclusion of Eugene Lin, M.D., of the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle in a recent article in the American Journal of Roentgenology. The medical imaging field of today, with its variety of options for the new radiologist, will slowly disappear, predicts Lin.
Citing the probable rise of ACO’s and the ongoing effort to trim healthcare costs, Lin thinks that the following features will dominate the medical imaging market in 2020:
If you haven’t seen the results from Health Imaging’s latest “Top Trends” survey, here are the highlights:
Why get a cardiovascular information system (CVIS)? Just ask Kerry Hamilton, Operations Manager of Heart and Vascular Care at Southern Regional Medical Center in Riverdale, Georgia.
“Our laborious process in electrocardiogram (ECG) management resulted in lost ECGs, missed revenue and report turnaround times that could take up to four days,” she writes in a recent Cath Lab Digest article. The source of the problem: paper.
Here is how she describes a paper-laden workflow:
The Medical Imaging Confidence Index (MICI), sponsored by The MarkeTechGroup LLC and The Association for Medical Imaging Management, comes out of a quartely online survey of radiology department managers from around the country. The index ranges from zero – representing zero confidence in the medical imaging market – to 200. In general, scores below 50 are worrisome, scores around 100 reflect ambivalence, and scores above 150 represent high confidence.
Not surprisingly, many of the scores for 2011 have been on the lower end of the spectrum and don’t show signs of going up:
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2011 Q1 |
2011 Q2 |
2011 Q3 |
Here is a collection of some of the latest news, advances and promising research in the medical imaging field:
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