Under legislation that has passed in the Senate, physicians will get a six-month reprieve from a 10 percent rate cut when treating Medicare patients. Doctors had warned that a cut in reimbursement rates would lead to physicians taking on fewer new Medicare patients, but now they'll receive a 0.5 percent raise when they treat the elderly and disabled.
A new report compiled by the Trust for America's Health says that while many states have made progress in preparing for a potential public health disaster, much more needs to be done. In addition, representatives from the nonpartisan advocacy group say that cuts in federal funding for state and local preparedness programs "threaten the nation's safety."
The Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield Foundation plans to announce that it is making a $1 million grant to the Indiana University School of Medicine to help fund the completion of a new medical simulation center.
Doctors often say healthcare would be better if insurers didn't interfere in medical decisions. Now some Louisville and Lexington physicians have a chance to prove it.
The government is promising $45 trillion more than it can deliver on Social Security, Medicare and other benefit programs. That is the gap between the promises the government has made in benefits and the projected revenue stream for these programs over the next 75 years, the Bush administration estimated.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has named members of two work groups that will seek consensus on the definitions and use of five common health IT terms. The Records Work Group will cover the terms electronic health record, electronic medical record and personal health record. The Networks Work Group will focus on the terms Regional Health Information Organization and Health Information Exchange.
InnerWireless, a provider of in-building wireless technology, announced that it will deploy its PanGo location management platform in the University of Michigan Health System's medical campus. This platform will enable the pharmacy department to track and monitor hundreds of boxes containing emergency drug supplies throughout its 913-bed medical campus. Pharmacy will become the first department in the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based University of Michigan Health System to use a real-time location system by incorporating PanGo into the health system's existing Cisco infrastructure.
The Canadian House of Commons has passed emergency legislation to reopen the Ontario nuclear reactor that produces the majority of the world's supply of medical isotopes. The site was shut down for safety maintenance, and the bill required all party support to override the advice of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and restart the 50-year-old reactor.
According to a study only 20 RHIOs in the United States are fully functional and a dozen are self-sustaining. The study questions many of the prevailing assumptions about how a nationwide health information network will emerge.
One of the objections to the implementation of speech recognition software in a radiology practice is that it generates more errors than traditional transcription methods, but new research disputes this claim. According to a scientific presentation at the 93rd scientific assembly and annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, transcribed reports show higher error rates than automated speech recognition applications.