Coalition promotes adoption of e-ordering for imaging

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.

According to the coalition, e-ordering prevents many of the potential issues associated with radiology benefit management (RBM) utilization. Concerns with the RBM model include regulatory oversight and a manually burdensome prior authorization system. The e-ordering solution provides physicians real-time, electronic access to pre-exam, case-by-case decisions that are linked to published, evidence-based clinical studies and are tailored to a patient's specific circumstances.

The coalition is recommending to lawmakers that the efforts to build incentives for e-prescribing should be broadened to include diagnostic imaging e-ordering solutions, according to Bibb Allen, MD, of the American College of Radiology (ACR), and founding member of the Imaging e-Ordering Coalition.

"Expanding on the e-prescribing model, e-ordering will do for diagnostic imaging what e-prescribing has done for the drug prescription process--simplify the way physicians' decisions for patient care are verified as medically appropriate and safe without compromising the physician-patient relationship," Allen said.






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