The fantasy: A primary-care doctor pulls out her iPad, pulls up a patient’s scans, and huddles with a radiologist, discussing the diagnosis. At the patient’s bedside, she uses the images to help the patient understand his situation. She plugs in an ultrasound probe and checks his heart functioning, sending an image back to the radiologist for a read. She enters … read more »

The families of one in five Americans had trouble paying medical bills in 2010, according to new research released this month. The good news: that percentage didn’t significantly increase between 2007 and 2010.

The numbers come from a report by the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan organization founded in 1995 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Although the percentage … read more »

Medicare imaging is down, and the American College of Radiology is creating a list of imaging procedures that should be done less often.

Happy new year.

At a meeting last Friday, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) confirmed that Medicare imaging decreased 2.5 percent in 2010. MedPAC views that as a good thing; a slide presentation says the “decrease in use of … read more »

How hard is the federal government cracking down on Medicare and Medicaid fraud? Tuesday morning, 65 federal and local agents and officers arrested 13 doctors and a nurse practitioner in New Jersey on charges of taking illegal kickbacks from a radiology clinic.

That’s a lot of man- and womanpower—especially for people accused of nonviolent crimes and presumably not likely to be … read more »

Seven-tesla MRI imaging is going to be big. So says A. Gregory Sorensen, MD, who this spring moved from academia, where he held professorships at MIT, Harvard, and Oxford, to the boardroom as CEO of Siemens’ North American health care division.

DOTmed News’ Brendon Nofziger quizzed Dr. Sorensen at last week’s Radiological Society of North America annual meeting in Chicago. The … read more »

A two-drug combination—an antibiotic and a synthetic protein—may alleviate radiation sickness, even if treatment begins a day after exposure to high levels of radiation, a new study indicates.

Researchers (led by scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital Boston, both in Boston and both affiliated with Harvard University) have achieved remarkable success with mice. A month after radiation exposures that … read more »

Well, the issue date is November, not April 1, so apparently the current issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology really did publish a study examining whether attendance at monthly radiology department faculty meetings was affected by the presence or absence of free food.

At least we think the food was free. The journal article calls it “complementary,” … read more »

Calm down; last week’s leaked document revealed that Walmart had an interest in becoming the nation’s largest provider of primary health-care services—not imaging.

Kaiser Health News and NPR obtained the document and reported its contents last week. Walmart was requesting information from potential partners about “dramatically” reducing the cost of health care by building “a national, integrated, low-cost primary care healthcare … read more »

Here’s a surprising contention: Medicare has already cut spending on imaging too much.

It comes from the Medical Imaging & Technology Alliance (MITA), a trade group for makers of medical imaging equipment. So perhaps it’s not so surprising.

MITA said in a Wednesday news release that, according to its own analysis of Medicare data, spending on imaging for each Medicare beneficiary has … read more »

Remember the Georgia radiology technician accused of faking reports on 1,289 mammograms? At least four women who received one of those mammograms aren’t waiting for developments in the case, which is now a year and a half old and nowhere near a trial.

They’ve sued.

Meanwhile, a twice-delayed preliminary hearing on several defense motions is scheduled for January. We’ll see.

Back in May … read more »