CEM has emerged as a diagnostic tool that adds functional information with which clinicians may identify more quickly whether an abnormality in breast tissue is likely cancerous.
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In conversations about the durability of medical equipment, the most commonly constructed analogies – namely those about asset depreciation, maintenance and after-market acquisition – are comparisons involving motor vehicles. But for the first time across both industries, the impact of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic also conjured up another apt comparison: that of supply chain shortages, parts and equipment delays, and confronting the financial challenges that such factors complicate.
In the 50 years since the first computed tomographic images in the United States were captured by EMI-made scanners at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, computed tomography (CT) imaging has become an invaluable diagnostic tool.
In earlier days of medical imaging studies, patients were routinely given lead aprons to shield the parts of their bodies that weren’t involved in the study from ionizing radiation.
The “No Surprises Act,” embedded within the federal Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, is meant to curb this practice, banning surprise bills for most emergency services, out-of-network cost sharing, balance billing for out-of-network providers at an in-network visit, and up-front notice about billing procedures and complaint disputes.
For the better part of the past decade-plus, staffing concerns in the medical imaging space were mostly concerned with managing the institutional knowledge loss of generational retirements.
Across America, the past few years have seen the social and cultural issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) elevated to a prominence comparable to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Institutions from law and government to business, athletics, the arts – and, of course, health care – have all striven to address long-held assumptions and implicit biases within their work.
In 2007, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) debuted its performance optimization framework for health care organizations, the Triple Aim. It is anchored in the acknowledgment that health care simultaneously faces spiraling costs, novel challenges, and questions of accessibility to broad segments of America. IHI proposed a framework encapsulating these concerns within a trio of responses, or aims: enhancing patient experience, improving population health and reducing costs.
Although communication is a fundamental skill in any working environment, choosing the right words to get your message across in a fast-paced, high-stakes environment like health care can be complicated.
For as much thought as goes into providing optimal patient experiences in health care from the perspectives of health outcomes and quality of care, management of revenue streams seldom seems to enter the conversation.
