The CMIO Leadership Forum presents a two-day, interactive leadership forum on "Transforming Healthcare Through Evidence-based Medicine," Oct.3-5 in Chicago.

The University of North Carolina (UNC) Health Care System in Chapel Hill, N.C., has appointed Donald C. Spencer, MD, MBA, to the role of chief medical informatics officer (CMIO).

Radiology, like all of healthcare, is changing in the face of reform, and one noticeable shift is the growing emphasis on evidence-based medicine. As U.S. organizations look to turn best practices into evidence-based policy for their regionsand committees like the Independent Payment Advisory Board aim to make a similar impact nationallythose working in medical imaging can look toward efforts like the Washington State Health Technology Assessment Program as a preview of whats to come.

This is certainly a disturbing trend: this weeks news brought yet another data breach to the forefront. This time, an unauthorized user gained access to and encrypted the server of a small Midwestern surgical practice and essentially held the information hostage in exchange for the password needed to regain access to the server.

ORLANDO, Fla.In the opening keynote presentation Aug. 14 at the 40th annual meeting of AHRA: the Association for Medical Imaging Management, Brian R. Klepper, PhD, had a warning for the radiology administrators in attendance: Hes coming to take your volumes.

Read on for part 2 of our article on the latest privacy and security information. Linn Foster Freedman, JD, an attorney with Nixon Peabody, presented a wealth of information during a recent program presented by the Rhode Island Quality Institute, about how hospitals need to better protect themselves against potential privacy and security vulnerabilities, such as data breaches.

Three in four patients who present at emergency departments with symptoms of acute MI (AMI) may be safely ruled out or accurately ruled in within an hour using a high sensitivity troponin algorithm, researchers reported online Aug. 13 in Archives of Internal Medicine. But an accompanying editorial cautioned that its implementation in general practice may be stymied by costs, complexity and confounding comorbidities.

The most literal advance on the interoperability front this month is new and revised standards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The three standards are intended to help expand the market for medical equipment that has device-to-device communications capabilities.