As a way to cut overall imaging utilization and spending, increased patient cost-sharing via high-deductible health insurance seems to work. But the approach may not do much to help patients tell medically recommended exams from frequently wasteful ones. 

A lot of people spend a lot of money searching for relief from pain in the lower back. It turns out the surest solution may also be the cheapest.

Flattery. Nepotism. Popularity bias. The real motives driving the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s choices of Golden Globe winners? No—a few of the foibles compromising the integrity of name-based academic research, including peer-reviewed work published in medical journals. 

The time has come for patient-facing physicians to collaborate more closely with radiologists in deciding whether or not to image. And, going forward, the decision must incorporate patients’ values about “the pressing need to perform imaging tests more wisely.”

Cigna will not pay for 3D mammograms at Boston-area hospitals after Feb. 15, 2016, WCVB reports. Cigna will cover 2D screening for breast cancer, but it said there’s not enough evidence yet to support 3D mammograms and that they used twice as much radiation as 2D screening.

Primary care residents learning to better handle iffy patient requests by using standardized patients (SPs)—i.e., instructors portraying patients for training purposes—are more satisfied with the resulting interventions. However, they do no better at ordering fewer exams deemed to be of low value by Choosing Wisely guidelines.

Providing women with financial incentives to undergo breast cancer screening did not lead to significantly more of them receiving a mammogram, according to a randomized, controlled trial. The women all had private insurance through the Tufts health plan in Massachusetts.

Value-based payments in radiology are here, and they are evolving fast. Nobody knows how they will morph, stretch, bend or otherwise play out in practice over the coming weeks, months and years. But there’s no more time to sit around waiting to find out before taking steps to adjust and prepare.