Case Studies

As CEO of a growing, multifaceted business enterprise, Matthew Lemak delegates many operating-budget decisions to the people who have the most to gain—or lose—from their choices. On capital budgeting, he is considerably more hands-on.

Often lost amid all the talk of U.S. healthcare’s volume-to-value transformation is the plain and simple truth that volume doesn’t stop mattering just because value matters more than it did before. This is especially germane to provider organizations caring for patients at the population level.

It’s 2016. If you’re not thinking about joining the growing ranks of healthcare providers that are digitally storing all clinical information from across the enterprise so it’s secure, expandable and readily accessible to authorized caregivers working anywhere and anytime, it’s time to wake up and smell the vendor-neutral archive (VNA).

When your organization puts values first, those values inform everything, from how patients are treated to the technology you install to provide care.

University Hospitals in Cleveland is half of the way through implementing a true enterprise image-management solution—a.k.a. VNA (vendor neutral archive)—and one key insider sees the advance as “a huge goldmine for patient care.”

Radiographs of the ankle, hip and knee getting coded as mammograms; a popular code-assist product failing right out of the gate and remaining troublesome months later; small billing companies shuttering their offices, leaving physician practices without any billing services at all. These are some of the scenarios reported in the wake of the Oct. 1, 2015, launch of the 10th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10).

Countless healthcare providers of every type heaved a sigh of relief when CMS announced a one-year grace period following the Oct. 1, 2015, launch of ICD-10.

How do you lead change—even when you’re not in charge? The answer to that question is both simpler and subtler than one might think, and it’s readily applicable to radiologists, radiology business managers, radiology technologists and everyone else within the sphere of medical imaging.

Relationship building is one of the most time consuming aspects of running a business.

Things are a bit complicated in healthcare, to say the least. Whether it's additional regulations, a competitive market or changing patient demographics, care delivery is becoming more complex every year.

A full year has gone by since 425-bed Northridge Hospital Medical Center in Los Angeles went live with a new enterprise-wide EMR solution from Cerner.

It was a gutsy move even by the standards of the borough that is home to the New York Yankees, the birthplace of hip-hop, and the largest zoo in the East: At just 23 years old, with no direct experience in healthcare, Joel Reisman decided to dive into the deep end of the outpatient medical imaging business in the Bronx.