Dispatches January 2024

• Tom Hoffman Named ACR General Counsel as Bill Shields Retires
• Elizabeth A. Morris, MD, FACR, Receives 2024 SBI Gold Medal
• Tiffany Gowen, MHA, Named 2024 SBI Honorary Fellow
• HPI Releases New 2.0 Beta Version of Neiman Almanac
• New CPI Module Focuses on Musculoskeletal Radiology
• ACRA Announces Scope of Practice Fund Awards for 2023–2024

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Tom Hoffman Named ACR General Counsel as Bill Shields Retires

The ACR has announced the appointment of a new general counsel. After more than 25 years leading the College’s legal team, General Counsel Bill Shields, JD, LLM, CAE, retired this month. Tom Hoffman, JD, CAE, vice president of Legal, has been named his successor.

Shields joined the ACR from a position as legislative counsel in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Prior to that, he held a variety of positions as a judge advocate in the U.S. Navy, including serving as a Congressional Fellow on the staff of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee.

Hoffman joined the ACR in 1997 as associate general counsel, moving up to vice president of Legal in 2019. He previously served as counsel in the U.S. Social Security Administration and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General.

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Elizabeth A. Morris, MD, FACR, Receives 2024 SBI Gold Medal

ACR fellow Elizabeth A. Morris, MD, FACR, recently was awarded the 2024 Gold Medal from the Society of Breast Imaging (SBI). Morris is a professor and chair of radiology in the medical school at the University of California, Davis.

Morris graduated summa cum laude from UC Davis with a degree in biochemistry and received her medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her residency at Weill Cornell Medical College. She also received a body/breast imaging fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she remained on the faculty until December 2020 and became chief of the breast imaging service and the Larry Norton Endowed Chair.

Besides being a fellow of the ACR, Morris also is a fellow of SBI and the International Society of MR in Medicine (ISMRM). She is a past president of SBI and is the inaugural equity, diversity and inclusion officer of ISMRM and co-chair of Women of ISMRM.

Her research focuses on how to use newer techniques, such as MRI, for early breast cancer detection and to improve the workup of breast lesions. In collaboration with her colleagues, she has written more than 230 papers, 40 chapters and five books about breast diseases, with an emphasis on the use of MRI. She has lectured both nationally and internationally at over 320 conferences. She has mentored more than 50 international research fellows and has received grants from the National Cancer Institute, the U.S. Department of Defense, RSNA, the Komen Foundation and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

Read more about Morris and this year’s SBI fellows inductees.

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Tiffany Gowen, MHA, Named 2024 SBI Honorary Fellow

The Society of Breast Imaging (SBI) recently named the ACR’s Tiffany Gowen, MHA, a 2024 Honorary Fellow. Gowen is the director of the ACR Commission on Patient- and Family-Centered Care and the lead staff of the Breast Cancer Screening Leaders Group.

Gowen received her master’s in public health administration from Purdue University Global and is currently a public health doctoral candidate at Capella University School of Nursing and Health Sciences. She serves on the board of the Cancer Action Coalition of Virginia and the White Ribbon Project.

She is a member of the American Cancer Society’s National Lung and Breast Cancer Roundtables and a co-founder of National Lung Cancer Screening Day. Gowen is a fierce advocate for breast and lung cancer screening and equitable healthcare. She says being a mom to her children, Savannah and Johnny, is her favorite and most important job.

Read more about PFCC and about National Lung Cancer Screening Day.

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HPI Releases New 2.0 Beta Version of Neiman Almanac

The Neiman Almanac, an online public resource published by the Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute (HPI) that provides imaging-focused Medicare data dating back to 2004, has been updated to a new 2.0 version.

The update includes an interactive interface that lets users evaluate Medicare imaging rates as well as overall cost. Other options enable users to choose data sets by modality (i.e., CT, MR), by body region, by location of service (i.e., inpatient, outpatient) and by race and gender of the patient.

The almanac contains heat maps to showcase differences by state since 2004, with charts highlighting trends over time by state or modality. Data sources include 100% Medicare Part B aggregated Data of national trends only along with beneficiary-level data from a 5% sample file that allows more detailed reporting by state and the demographics of the patients.

Read more about the 2.0 release and view the new Neiman Almanac.

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New CPI Module Focuses on Musculoskeletal Radiology

This newly released self-assessment module from the ACR® Continuous Professional Improvement (CPI) program is designed to test your MSK imaging knowledge with more than 235 multi-modality images using radiography, MRI, CT and US.

The online-only module features MSK case topics relevant to community and academic settings, ranging from commonly encountered sports and traumatic injuries to arthritic, inflammatory and infectious conditions, as well as tumor and tumor-like conditions, metabolic disorders, post-surgical and hardware complications.

Order your module today.

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ACRA Announces Scope of Practice Fund Awards for 2023–2024

The ACR Association® (ACRA) has awarded grants from the Scope of Practice (SOP) Fund for the 2023–2024 state legislative cycle to the Alabama Academy of Radiology, the Iowa Radiological Society and the Michigan Radiological Society. The organizations will use these grants to help achieve their advocacy goals and educate lawmakers and legislative staff about the crucial role radiologists play in the healthcare system, while also alerting them to threats within state legislatures such as non-physician SOP expansion.

ACRA created the SOP Fund in 2023 to help safeguard patients and patient access to radiologist expertise by battling state and federal non-physician SOP expansion legislation. Non-physician groups have been pushing for new laws that would reduce radiologist oversight, enhance their authority and enable them to bill directly.

Read more about the SOP Fund. For more information about the ACR SOP events, contact Eugenia Brandt, ACR senior government affairs director, or Dillion Harp, ACR senior state government relations specialist.