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In advance of today’s House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee hearing on medical radiation, the Medical Imaging and Technology Alliance yesterday announced CT manufacturers will begin installing new radiation dose safeguards on scanners as soon as by the end of this year. The American College of Radiology (ACR) yesterday also announced that at today’s hearing it will call for the mandatory accreditation of all advanced imaging and radiation oncology providers.
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center are incorporating radiation dose exposure reports into the EMR, an effort that they hope will lead to an accurate assessment of whether any cancer risk is associated with low-dose radiation exposure from medical imaging tests, based on an article in February’s Journal of the American College of Radiology.
Medipattern will provide B-CAD [computer-aided detection] software that uses breast ultrasound imaging at the Ocean Medical Imaging Center in Toms River, N.J.
Researchers have found recent evidence that shows the growth of external, off-hours teleradiology services (EOTS) has slowed in recent years, despite a significant increase in the number of radiology practices using those services between 2003 and 2007, according to a study in the November issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology.
Brit Systems unveiled UrgentWorks, a Web-based application that supports flagging of urgent findings, test results and emergency room discordance by reporting clinicians, and the communication and on-going tracking of results to the ordering physician, at the 2009 Association for Medical Imaging Management (AHRA) meeting this week in Las Vegas.
Radiologists' workloads grew substantially in the past few years, with procedures increasing 7 percent and physician work relative value units increasing 10 percent from 2002-2003 to 2006-2007, according to research published in this month's Radiology.
GE Healthcare has launched a partnership with a provider of clinical decision support for diagnostic imaging, Medicalis.
An alliance of healthcare providers, technology companies and diagnostic imaging organizations have formed the Imaging e-Ordering Coalition to promote health IT-enabled decision-support for diagnostic imaging, or e-ordering.
The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (DRA), which slashed Medicare reimbursement for diagnostic imaging, has resulted in layoffs and postponed plans for equipment acquisition, according to survey results in the July issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology.
In the first of three roundtables on healthcare delivery system reform held by the Senate Finance Committee, participants this week discussed increasing primary care physician payments by reducing payments to imaging services providers.
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The introduction of a computerized radiology order entry (CROE) system with decision support capabilities into an integrated multispecialty group practice may substantially reduce the growth rate of high-cost outpatient imaging volume, according to the results of a seven-year, time-series analysis published online in the journal Radiology.
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The use of health IT to reduce rehospitalizations will be welcome but also disruptive, said Stephen Jencks, an independent consultant in healthcare safety during a Feb. 24 webinar on the potential use of health IT to mitigate rehospitalizations, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
During the Health IT Standards Committee meeting on Feb. 24 in Washington, D.C., the Clinical Operations Workgroup sought to gather comments on proposed recommendations on implementation specifications for content exchange, vocabulary and code set standards for the Interim Final Rule of meaningful use.
The state of Maine currently has the largest operating statewide exchange in the country in relation to population. Although Devore Culver, Executive Director of Maine’s HealthInfoNet, expects that distinction to change in the months ahead, the state’s HIE is entering the final months of its demonstration phase, and is slated to move in to its full statewide implementation in the second half of 2010. Culver, who is former CIO of Eastern Maine Health Care, recently spoke with CMIO about the progress HealthInfoNet has made.
In 2006, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), a branch of the FDA, began examining the number of medical device reports they received. Over the past two years, the number of submitted reports has increased, sparking a demand for the CDRH to make a move to electronic reporting.
A new hospital breaking ground usually isn’t breaking news. But the vision of patient care at one new facility, tentatively named Palomar Medical Center West (PMC West), is currently illegal under California state law.
