Meaningful Use and Radiology: Fully Certified Versus Modular Approaches

“Why make your RIS into an electronic health record (EHR) just to satisfy meaningful use?” David Avrin, MD, PhD, asks. It is a question that Avrin, professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at the University of California–San Francisco, has been asking (in one form or another) since the...

Radiologist As Gatekeeper, Part I

For at least a dozen years, radiology has played a cat-and-mouse game with the notion of assuming a more active role in determining which patients get imaging. Due to concerns about referring physicians, the mouse, to date, remains elusive. The ascent of value creation in health care, however, has...

Children’s Hospital Colorado Reaps the Benefits of an Image-enabled EHR

Since opening on February 17, 1910, the 375-bed Children’s Hospital Colorado (CHC), in Aurora has tried to be a leader in providing the best health-care outcomes for children. Technology plays a key role here, and it will continue to do so as construction of a new wing (which will bring...

The VNA Revealed: Understanding Its Role in a Health-delivery System

Many radiology administrators remember purchasing their first or second PACS: It was probably no small financial commitment, and justifying the expense might have been a painful process. Just as those older PACS began to collect a little dust—not to mention massive archives—the vendor-neutral archive (VNA) came creeping...

Duke University Health System Selects Epic-friendly VNA

When Duke University Health System (DUHS) in Durham, North Carolina, goes live with its full-blown Epic electronic health record (EHR) implementation in June 2013, another equally important transition will have happened in the background: the installation of a new vendor-neutral archive (VNA) that will eventually contain all 135 terabytes of image...

MU2: Value Proposition for Radiology

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...

Ready, Set—Attest

When Keith Dreyer, DO, PhD, speaks to an audience of radiologists on meaningful use (something he does quite often, these days), he always asks for a show of hands to determine who is doing what with regard to demonstrating meaningful use of IT. Dreyer, vice chair of radiology computing...

Radiology and Meaningful Use: Questions Loom As Attestation Begins

It was the radiology community’s version of the shot heard ‘round the world: in April 2010, the Continuing Extension Act of 2010 revised the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act’s definition of a hospital-based eligible professional to include hospital-based physicians practicing in outpatient settings, thereby...