A Medicare panel determined that there is not enough evidence to justify annual CT scans to detect early lung cancer in heavy smokers. The CMS's nine-member Medicare Evidence Development and Coverage Advisory Committee voted Wednesday against paying for the screening tool. Read more here.
The Obama administration's top Medicare official is stepping down from his post. CMS Principal Deputy Administrator Jonathan Blum has been with the agency for more than five years. CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner announced Blum's resignation, effective May 16, in an e-mail to staff. Read more here.
The use of business analytics may be a relatively new phenomenon in medicine, but it has been used to great effect in other industries for quite some time. Read more here.
Although one of the main goals of the Meaningful Use program is to improve the quality of care, there appears to be "no association" between being a "meaningful user" of electronic health records and the quality of care provided to patients, according to a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. Read more here.
The Medicare program is the source of a small fortune for many U.S. doctors, according to a trove of government records that reveal unprecedented details about physician billing practices nationwide. The government insurance program for older people paid nearly 4,000 physicians in excess of $1 million each in 2012, according to the new data. Those figures [...]
SHINE Medical Technologies, Inc. (SHINE), a Wisconsin-based company dedicated to being the world leader in safe, clean, affordable production of medical isotopes, announced today that it has entered into a strategic long-term supply agreement with GE Healthcare, a division of the General Electric Company, for supply of molybdenum-99 (moly-99). This is the first announcement of a [...]
The U.S. Senate on March 31 is expected to vote on and pass the House version (H.R. 4302) of legislation to put another annual patch on the Medicare SGR payment formula for physicians, delay the ICD-10 compliance date to October 2015 and further delay enforcement of the Medicare two-midnight payment policy until March 2015. Read more [...]
The House of Representatives on Thursday approved a temporary fix to the sustainable growth rate (SGR) for one year in a bill that also delays ICD-10 implementation until at least October 2015 and postpones hospital compliance with the controversial "two-midnight rule"and recovery audits of medically unnecessary claims until March 2015. Read more here.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) is ramping up his opposition to the medical device tax, spending some time with his medtech stakeholders to renew his call to repeal the tax. Read more here.
While lauding the Health eDecisions project for its work to set standards to support clinical decision support (CDS), a Health IT Buzz post announces a new initiative called the Clinical Quality Framework (CQF). This new project from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will focus on "harmonizing" the standards for clinical decision support and electronic clinical quality measurement. [...]