What’s healthy? What’s not? These questions should be easy to answer in our world of high-tech, high-resolution scanners. But population-based studies demonstrate they are anything but.

Of all the departments in a hospital, radiology arguably holds the most and richest variety of data. There’s so much data, in fact, that it can be difficult to know what to do with it all and how to handle it. As the healthcare industry continues to shift toward a value-based payment model, utilizing that data becomes even more important as hospitals take a look at their operations and try to improve their performance. For radiology departments struggling with information overload, business analytics can provide a solution.

Sharing — it’s a quality we all learned at a young age to aspire toward. Our parents, our teachers, our friends and our siblings (OK, maybe not our siblings!) all challenged us to learn to share. Over the past few years with implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), even our federal government has created an impetus to share — to share information, to share patients, to share revenues, to share responsibility. With the scramble toward Meaningful Use (MU), which inherently requires exchange (sharing), we are finally seeing that the theory is much easier than the execution of that idea.1 Many large organizations are still struggling to share information

Radiation dose continues to be one of the hottest topics in radiology, as government mandates and public concern are forcing healthcare teams to find ways to achieve the same high image quality while reducing dose. The 2014 annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in December reflected those concerns, featuring sessions on the latest metrics for measuring dose and ways to keep dose down.

It’s been a busy year in women’s health, and the topic of breast density remains on the forefront. To date, 21 states have enacted the breast density inform law, which requires healthcare providers to inform women if they have dense breast tissue. Several other states have also either endorsed the bill, or are currently working on it.