President-elect Barack Obama's incoming administration is drawing on the network of campaign supporters to lay the groundwork for an attempt to restructure the U.S. healthcare system, waging an outreach campaign by marrying lobbying and social-networking technologies.

Quest International will begin shipping Matrox Graphics Xenia Series display controller boards with medical LCD displays from AlphaView LCD, NEC and Totoku.

CHICAGOIT support needs to transition from the firefighter to the fire prevention model. Support can be reactive or proactive, and it should be no surprise that the proactive model yields superior results ranging from increased IT and radiologist efficiency to improved systems operations. RSNA participants stuck in the reactive model received a crash course in practical and operational improvements during a Tuesday morning refresher course led by Paul Nagy, PhD, associate professor of radiology at University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore at the 94th annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

CHICAGOA collection to imaging informatics tools developed under the umbrella of the National Cancer Institutes caBIG (cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid) are demonstrating the potential for collecting, analyzing, integrating, and disseminating information associated with cancer research and care, according to a scientific presentation at the 94th annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

CHICAGOThe luminance levels of flat-panel displays can degrade over time and are affected by the utilization of the monitors, according to a team of Japanese researchers who presented their analysis in a poster presentation at the 94th annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

The use of EHRs may help reduce paid malpractice settlements for physicians, according to a study in the Nov. 24 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, which demonstrated a trend toward lower paid malpractice claims for physicians that are active users of EHR technology.

If change is constant, so, too, is resistance to it. The form of the interpretative report for radiology imaging evaluation has remained relatively little changed since the specialtys debut in clinical medicine. The introduction of structured reporting systemsthe use of a defined format, organization and nomenclature for diagnostic interpretationoffers the potential to improve clinical communication, aid in evidence-based data collection and improve the quality of patient care.

Health Level Seven (HL7), a developer of healthcare standards, has approved four new implementation guides for its Clinical Document Architecture (CDA). The guides address documentation requirements for diagnostic imaging, consultations, quality reporting and home health monitoring.