The widespread practice of incentivizing mammogram completion via cash payments, typically by insurance companies, is unethical according to a Viewpoint article published recently in JAMA by an expert from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Instead, incentives should be offered to women to use evidence-based decision aids to decide if they want a mammogram, even if this policy likely averts fewer breast cancer deaths overall.

September 14, 2015 — University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) researcher Vladimir Zharov, Ph.D., D.Sc., was awarded a $1.7 million grant by the National Cancer Institute for clinical testing of a new technology called theranostics, indicated for early diagnosis and treatment of melanoma.

Mevion's proton therapy system.

The use of radiation therapy to treat cancer has been in existence for over a century, tracing back to the early days of Wilhelm Röntgen and his discovery of X-rays. Reportedly — and not without controversy — one of the first Americans to use X-ray radiation to experimentally treat cancer was Chicago homeopathic physician and chemist Emil Grubbe.

Navigating coverage decisions can be overwhelming and confusing, especially for high-end imaging equipment, where service contracts depend heavily on a combination of several different factors. This uncertainty has only been magnified as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) began enforcing strict compliance for equipment manufacturers’ maintenance protocols and schedules in 2010. While this increases hospital accountability and patient safety, it also requires significant upfront costs.
Big Data from Twitter showing stressed language posts compared to CDC reported heart attacks in study by Johannes Eichstaedt.
Understanding How Big Data Will Change Healthcare

The buzz term “big data” has made a rapid entry onto the healthcare scene in the past couple years with promises of improving healthcare, but there are still many trying to figure out how exactly it will accomplish this. Efforts were made to explain big data and its application to healthcare at the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) meetings earlier this year.

Value-driven health platform Spreemo has completed the first phase of a study to determine how interpretative variability in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a standard diagnostic test, can influence the course of a patient’s treatment.

Zevacor Molecular (Zevacor), manufacturer and distributor of positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) radiopharmaceuticals, announced the arrival of a 70 MeV Cyclotron at its new production facility in Noblesville, Indiana.

Westinghouse Electric Company and NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes announced a memorandum of understanding to explore producing medical radioisotopes from the core of commercial nuclear reactors, and methods of global distribution. The exploration involves generating the most widely used radioisotope in medical diagnostic imaging by treating an isotope of the chemical element molybdenum rather than enriched uranium.

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