Electronic sharing of patient information among all 12 major emergency departments in the Memphis, Tennessee, area resulted in annual savings of nearly $2 million, mostly because of reduced hospital admissions, according to a study published online last week in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Interestingly, the study found that electronic health information exchange (HIE) use increased some types … read more »

A young woman who ended up paralyzed after two University of California, Davis radiologists missed an arteriovenous malformation in an MRI scan won a $7.6 million malpractice verdict on Friday.

The defense conceded that the abnormal mass was visible on the scan but said that it was “subtle” and therefore that missing it fell within the appropriate standard of care. The … read more »

Self magazine slams teleradiology in an article posted on the magazine’s Web site and the MSNBC site.

The magazine headline reads “The Hidden Dangers of Outsourcing Radiology.” The subhead elaborates: “That scan of your brain, bones or breasts you got last Tuesday? It might have been read by someone who isn’t a doctor and lives 12 time zones away. If, that … read more »

A patient shuffles into the emergency department, presenting with a minor injury or vague complaint of pain. The next step would be “please take a seat and wait until we call your name,” right?

Not at the Issaquah Campus of Swedish Medical Center, just east of Seattle. There’s no seat to take, because there’s no waiting room. Nor is there a … read more »

Virtual Radiologic’s big acquisition last year of NightHawk Radiology has yielded mixed results for both entities, according to a new report on the teleradiology market from the health-care research company KLAS.

You can purchase the report, titled Teleradiology Services 2011: Times are Changing, here—for $980 if you’re a provider, $11,980 if you’re not. (We don’t know how many nonproviders will pay … read more »

Erroneous CT scan readings by four British Columbia radiologists in 2010 have so far contributed to at least three deaths and serious continuing harm to the health of several others, the health minister for the Canadian province announced this week.

We’ve written previously about the mess in the province, where an examination of the work of four radiologists eventually involved checking … read more »

Japan’s top mobile phone operator plans to introduce a new smartphone with three removable “jackets,” one of which will measure radiation levels.

One of the other two jackets will measure acetone in the breath and produce a reading on how hungry the user is and how fast he or she is burning fat. The third will compute the level of skin-damaging … read more »

Earlier this week, Diagnostic Imaging explored several ways in which MRI machines are becoming more patient-friendly. This comes on the heels, however, of a PLoS ONE research article that indicates they still have a way to go.

Diagnostic Imaging cited three specific improvements:

Extremity scanners, which scan ankles, wrists, and other parts of extremities more efficiently (and more cheaply) than running a … read more »

The use of CT scans to diagnose appendicitis has soared since the 1990s, according to a new study. What the study doesn’t address is whether that’s good or bad for patients.

The numbers are certainly dramatic. The study, published online August 1 in Annals of Emergency Medicine, analyzed a sample of 447,011 U.S. emergency department visits from 1992 through 2006, using … read more »

Perhaps Philips Healthcare thinks Houston is due for a plague. Philips and The Methodist Hospital Research Institute of Houston are collaborating on developing new imaging technology designed to identify the start and cause of an infectious disease epidemic.

According to a news release from The Methodist Hospital System, Philips and Methodist are creating an $8.6 million imaging suite that will study … read more »