Social media can be a boon to healthcare workers and the provider institutions they work for—but it can just as easily be a bust. Just ask the nursing students expelled from school for posting “hilarious” x-rays of an anonymous emergency patient with a foreign object lodged inside a body cavity. The students committed no HIPAA violation, just a breach in basic ethics. But the lapse was enough to derail a couple of promising careers before they even began.

Implementing structured reporting templates has helped an academic radiology department increase its collective use of the clear and definitive term normal. However, use of the fuzzier term unremarkable also went up, suggesting more training may be in order.

U.S. healthcare is in for a wave of technology-driven disruption over the next five years unlike any it’s seen up to now—and it’s up to imaging professionals to light the way in figuring out what to embrace, what to reject and what to take a chance on.

Smoothing barriers impeding radiologist/referring physician communication can better care through improved timeliness and more nuanced interpretations, according to a study published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology. For the University of Texas Health Science Center, this meant building a communication tool within PACS and assigning clerical staff to troubleshoot the system, rather than leaving radiologists to figure it out on their own.

A man has been in a motorcycle accident. He’s in your healthcare system now, somewhere between the ED for evaluation and the discharge desk en route home. How’d you do at coordinating his care across all the steps in between?

Radiology’s shift to value-based care has providers considering even the smallest details related to the patient experience. A recent study published by Current Problems in Diagnostic Radiology, however, shows that radiology residents are not being trained on the proper way to communicate exam results to patients.

Is Northern California becoming the most medical imaging-friendly region in the U.S.? The case could be made.

When it comes to knowing codes of ethics pertinent to their profession, radiologists and radiology trainees are largely wandering around in a darkness of their own choosing: In a recent survey, widely distributed and promoted online, more than three-quarters of rad respondents said they’ve never read the American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics.