Friday, January 27
Reimbursement cuts, radiology benefits management, accountable care organizations—the list of strategies to control soaring U.S. healthcare costs is long and growing. But perhaps to truly control costs, healthcare needs to revisit where physicians' careers begin: medical school.
Monday, January 23
“It wouldn’t surprise me if in five or 10 years this procedure replaced awake [deep brain simulation surgery],” Jason M. Schwalb, MD, director of movement disorder and behavioral neurosurgery at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, said in an interview. However, Schwalb confirmed that the data to support intraoperative MRI as a complete replacement for the conventional awake technique are not yet available.
Friday, January 20
Results of two studies suggest that a new, investigational colorectal cancer screening test developed in collaboration between Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and Exact Sciences of Madison, Wis., is highly accurate and significantly more sensitive than other noninvasive tests at detecting precancerous tumors and early-stage cancer, according to a statement issued Jan. 18 by Mayo Clinic.
Thursday, January 12
Written by John Morrissey
The pace of progress in developing interoperability between medical devices and data destinations is influenced as much by well-articulated demand as by technical capability—and it’s up to CMIOs and other beneficiaries of such interoperability to push the issue, said Julian M. Goldman, MD, medical director of the biomedical engineering program at Partners HealthCare System in Boston.
Friday, January 06
As reimbursement cuts loom, integration with a larger hospital system has become inescapable for some private practice physicians. That process includes the grueling task of transferring data from the practice to the hospital. While hospital integration may be valuable, ensuring that patient data are stored and transferred properly may be nothing short of a battle. Here is one practice's tale.
Monday, December 19
Clinical decision support (CDS) systems and alerts have the potential to help providers make sense of a vast web of medical knowledge, but most don’t differentiate between information that is urgent and information that may be less immediately relevant, alerting providers to both trivial medical concerns and life-threatening circumstances, according to Aaron S. Kesselheim, MD, of the division of pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacoeconomics at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Monday, December 19
The migration from paper charts to EMRs offers the opportunity to provide access to patients, consultants and other caregivers. Electronic records also offer potential for greater transparency, improved efficiency and decreased costs. However, some think that sharing doctors’ notes electronically could lead to greater patient confusion and more work for the physician. Two articles published in the Dec. 20 issue of
Annals of Internal Medicine use survey data to shed light on both sides of the issue.
Friday, December 16
Individuals with the lung cancer-susceptibility gene Ki-
ras may be more susceptible to radiation-induced cancers than individuals who don’t express the mutation, according to animal model research published in the December issue of
Radiation Research. In the wake of the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST), which linked annual CT screening with a 20 percent mortality reduction, researchers from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C., sought to determine the carcinogenic risk of annual CT screening exams.
Friday, December 16
Written by John Morrissey
The ramp-up in proportions of information functions done electronically could make elusive targets even further out of range for many specialty practices, leaving them unable to tap the HITECH Act incentives in Stage 2 and position themselves for the baseline computer capacity to participate in the care coordination that will be an essential part of performance-based payment models, said Thomas C. Barber, MD, chair of a group within the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons that advocates for the adoption of EMRs by its membership.
Wednesday, December 14
Four experts attempted to set straight the record on accelerated partial breast brachytherapy (APBI) after a Dec. 7 presentation by MD Anderson researchers at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, which concluded that APBI is associated with inferior effectiveness and increased toxicity compared with whole breast irradiation in older women. The researchers outlined numerous flaws ranging from the data source to study design to omitted information, during a teleconference on Dec. 13.
Tuesday, December 06
Written by John Morrissey
As preparations get under way for the breadth and quantity of electronic information in Stage 2 meaningful use, distinctly different challenges for HITECH Act’s Stage 3 will require a provider focus on quality, quality and quality.
Monday, December 05
A registry jointly administered by the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) for monitoring patients who receive transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) therapy in the U.S. will provide a template for future collaborative projects, ACC’s president said in an interview. A long-term goal is to grow the registry into a robust, disease-specific resource for clinicians, regulators and others.
Wednesday, November 23
Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs have launched a collaborative project that uses magnetoencephalography to study military personnel suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) and better define the mechanism of the relationship between the two conditions.
Tuesday, November 22
Diffusion tensor MR scans revealed subtle injuries in the brains of high school football and hockey players who took routine hits to the head—even if they did not suffer a concussion, according to a study published online Nov. 12 in
Magnetic Resonance Imaging. "The study is preliminary, but raises powerful questions about the consequences of the mildest head injury among youths with developing brains," said Jeffrey Bazarian, MD, MPH, associate professor of emergency medicine at University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y.
Tuesday, November 22
Written by Lisa Fratt. Sponsored by an education grant by NDSsi.
When Kaleida Health, a five-hospital system in Buffalo, N.Y., began the process of replacing its radiology PACS and cardiology PACS in mid-2010, it also decided to refresh its displays. The enterprise-wide upgrade entailed display systems across four department, radiology, cardiology, emergency medicine and critical care.
Monday, November 21
As technologies proliferate and health reform initiatives take hold, more and more information becomes available, but healthcare executives are still struggling to realize its potential. For the purpose of applying vast amounts of information to practical use, Cynthia Zak, health information management and privacy director at Milford Hospital in Westport, Conn., foresees the emergence of a new role at hospitals and healthcare organizations: the chief knowledge officer (CKO).
Cynthia Zak, health information management (HIM) and privacy director at Milford Hospital in Westport, Conn.,
Tuesday, November 01
Three prominent cardiovascular researchers have teamed up to provide what they say will be a more efficient IT-based process for moving cardiovascular devices through the investigational process. The partnership will combine clinical and analytical expertise with core laboratory firepower to give sponsors a streamlined, high-quality product that better meets regulatory demands, one of the directors, Jeffrey J. Popma, MD, said in an exclusive interview.
Thursday, October 27
The final accountable care organization (ACO) rule issued last week by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is big news for providers and organizations alike. As stakeholders wade through the regulation, Peter W. Carmel, MD, American Medical Association (AMA) president, discussed his reaction on the ruling in an exclusive interview.
Monday, October 17
More than half of women will receive at least one false-positive recall after 10 years of annual mammography screening, according to a study published Oct. 18 in the
Annals of Internal Medicine. The findings may fan the flames of the screening debate as an accompanying editorial suggested that the results support screening intervals of two years or more. However, educating women about the incidence of false positives may reduce anxiety, according to the lead author.
Friday, October 07
Written by Kaitlyn Dmyterko
While the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission’s (MedPAC’s) overall goal to scrap the government’s sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula is commendable, most say the commission is going about it the wrong way and have asked MedPAC to rethink its proposal. A MedPAC solution, proposal in September, was recommended by members in a 15-2 vote Oct. 6; however, most say the plan needs reworking, particularly because the proposal to overturn SGR is laced with long-term freezes and cuts to physician payments.
