It’s official: The reporting window for MACRA has begun. While CMS has eased the reporting requirements for 2017, calling it a transition year, practices aiming for full participation still need to report all of the required measurements for a continuous period of at least 90 days. In fact, groups looking to maximize their chances of a positive adjustment should report as much data as possible, according to CMS.

Incomplete radiology reports that lead to inappropriate coding and, thus, hits to reimbursement can be headed off by structured reporting, according to a study conducted at NYU Langone School of Medicine and published online Dec. 24 in the Journal of the American College of Radiology. 

Female radiologists have made strides increasing their presence and visibility over the 35 years since the 1981 founding of the American Association for Women Radiologists (AAWR). However, their numbers continue to lag far behind those of their male counterparts, especially in leadership positions. 

“He looked across the sea and knew how alone he was now. But he could see the prisms in the deep dark water and the line stretching ahead and the strange undulation of the calm.” So wrote Ernest Hemingway in The Old Man and the Sea. And what does this have to do with medical imaging? 

The CT Protocol team at the University of Wisconsin have created a methodology for measuring organizational adherence to standardized CT protocols, published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology. Based on finding outliers in a large pool of scanning data, the workflows can be scaled to any size practice and are intended to help imaging centers identify problems.

As the global population is steadily growing at a rate of 88 million people per year, researchers are using advanced nuclear methods to study pest resistance in corn that could help to make significant strides toward solving global food shortages.

Radiology departments and practices can incorporate principles of patient- and family-centered care (PFCC) into clinical operations without hampering productivity. Every upgrade to radiology equipment and environment represents a new opportunity to engage patients and their families. And PFCC is “a collaborative process—a journey, not a destination.” 

Patient delays related to MRI exams seem to be contagious—and even capable of crossing the Atlantic.