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The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission’s (MedPAC) proposal to raise the utilization rate for imaging equipment to 90 percent is unrealistic based on fundamental economic principles and from a basic medical workflow perspective, according to an analysis released yesterday by the Access to Medical Imaging Coalition (AMIC).
The American College of Radiology (ACR) is asking its members to contact their Representative to request that a recent bill prohibiting physician self-referral be rolled into the healthcare reform bill introduced last week in the U.S. House of Representatives.
In its most recent report to Congress, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) focused on how incentives in the Medicare payment systems could be changed from those that reward volume, to ones that reward value. The report also suggested penalizing providers of high-cost, low-quality care with lower payments and cutting payments to private plans that provide Medicare coverage.
Healthcare reform cannot survive on expanding coverage alone; it requires promoting best practices to fix what is broken, wrote President Barack Obama in a letter sent June 2 to Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Max Baucus, D-Mont.,--the two key stakeholders who have been at odds over the payor component of the administration's healthcare reform plan.
The Access to Medical Imaging Coalition (AMIC) released new data analysis Monday countering recommendations from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), which has called for significant cuts in physician reimbursement rates for advanced medical imaging procedures.
A recent recommendation from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) to change the formula that determines physician reimbursement rates for advanced imaging procedures "is based on a deeply flawed survey that should be rejected," according to the Access to Medical Imaging Coalition (AMIC). Specifically, MedPAC has called on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to significantly increase the formula's assumption about the amount of time that advanced imaging equipment is used by physicians by 40 percent, which will further slash reimbursement rates.
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) is scheduled to vote on a series of recommendations at its November meeting that would place new requirements on disclosing financial relationships between drug manufacturers, devicemakers, physicians and other providers.
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A new survey has found that utilization rates for radiation therapy (RT) equipment used in freestanding cancer treatment centers are closer to the current assumed rate of 50 percent rather than the 90 percent proposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in the Medicare physician fee schedule proposed rule for 2010.
Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives unveiled their healthcare reform legislation Friday, calling for a 75 percent increase in the equipment utilization rate and an increase of 25 to 50 percent in the reduction of the technical component of imaging for multiple procedures.
Data released by the Radiology Business Management Association (RBMA) this week demonstrated that the use rate of diagnostic imaging equipment in an outpatient setting is approximately one half the amount claimed by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) and the Administration of President Barack Obama.
Although evidence-based medicine has been the focus of work by many healthcare researchers, molecular imaging and nuclear medicine has received scant attention in this arena. Clinical colleagues in fields such as cardiology and oncology are able to routinely participate in multinational trials of the latest interventional devices and pharmaceutical agents.
The Medical Imaging & Technology Alliance (MITA) has called on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to reject the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission's (MedPAC) recommendations for significant changes to physician reimbursement rates for advanced medical imaging procedures.
A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report for the Obama Administration and the new 111th Congress contains several policies for healthcare reform recommendations that directly impact how medical imaging services are delivered and reimbursed, according to the American College of Radiology (ACR).
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The use of health IT to reduce rehospitalizations will be welcome but also disruptive, said Stephen Jencks, an independent consultant in healthcare safety during a Feb. 24 webinar on the potential use of health IT to mitigate rehospitalizations, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
During the Health IT Standards Committee meeting on Feb. 24 in Washington, D.C., the Clinical Operations Workgroup sought to gather comments on proposed recommendations on implementation specifications for content exchange, vocabulary and code set standards for the Interim Final Rule of meaningful use.
In 2006, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), a branch of the FDA, began examining the number of medical device reports they received. Over the past two years, the number of submitted reports has increased, sparking a demand for the CDRH to make a move to electronic reporting.
A new hospital breaking ground usually isn’t breaking news. But the vision of patient care at one new facility, tentatively named Palomar Medical Center West (PMC West), is currently illegal under California state law.
When officials at Howard Memorial Hospital in Nashville, Ark., started drawing up plans for a new facility that opened in July 2009, Cindy York, the hospital’s director of radiology, had to make some decisions.