November 15, 2007 - The Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA) yesterday said the proposed standards for electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) confirm that the time is now to require e-prescribing in Medicare.

November 15, 2007 – The Kensey Nash Corporation said this week its first commercial product kit shipment of its proprietary bone void filler OsseoFit Porous Tissue Matrix to Biomet Sports Medicine, Inc., the sports medicine subsidiary of Biomet Inc.

Due to its expense and limited availability, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is rarely considered a first-line diagnostic tool, taking a back seat to less costly and more mobile imaging modalities, such as ultrasound and computed tomography (CT). But thanks to advancements in speed and imaging — and the absence of ionizing radiation — MR has managed to gain ground where CT has previously dominated, and in the process, raise the bar on clinical diagnostics.

The digital environment and advanced technology has brought diagnostic imaging to the forefront of healthcare, making images as accessible to any physician as they are to radiologists. As a result, referring physicians and specialists are increasingly reading imaging exams before radiologists or even without a radiologists’ review. This threatens to make radiology obsolete for certain specialties, unless radiologists adapt by further changing workflow. This is a call to arms for radiologists, who must adapt before they are put on the endangered list.
Imaging’s accessibility

The more you know about a disease, the better you can characterize it and treat it, and the path toward personalized medicine is clearly mapped out in PET imaging.
Positron emission tomography (PET) has already proven effective in helping clinicians diagnose, stage, treat and monitor many types of tumors and lesions in the body, and yet its utility continues to expand across more cancers and diseases.


Many patients who were previously turned down as surgery candidates because their tumors were considered unreachable are getting a second chance.
Extremely accurate dose delivery though stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) is enabling clinicians to reach formerly unreachable tumors. However, it has been limited to areas of the head and neck until quite recently. Through cone-beam CT, SBRT can now be used to target tumors throughout the body.


Over the past decade the medical imaging industry has slowly but surely moved toward the all-digital era. Storage rooms for film archives near the radiology department are giving way to temperature-controlled IT rooms with servers and storage hardware running on a fast data network. Having been trained to read on films hung from light boxes, radiologists have had to adapt to softcopy viewing, reading off of medical-grade display monitors instead.
Cross-training physicians would close the gap between reading complex cardiac CT exams and a standard chest CT exam. Photo courtesy of Toshiba America Medical Systems.
Cross-training physicians would close the gap between reading complex cardiac CT exams and a standard chest CT exam. Photo courtesy of Toshiba America Medical Systems.

The volatile debate over who should control cardiac imaging technologies — radiologists or cardiologists — has created a rift between the two fields. However, three physicians representing both fields are calling a truce on the turf wars by embracing the notion of greater collaboration. They believe this approach will optimize the potential of cardiac imaging.
Who is in Control?

The more knowledge a physician has about a disease, the better equipped he or she is to care for the patient. That is the idea behind leveraging clinical information for decision support. The future of knowledge-driven clinical decision support is about being able to analyze all available information from patient records and make inferences based on this information.

November 15, 2007 – Toshiba America Medical Systems Inc. today introduced a fourth generation contrast-free imaging technique, Time and Space Angiography (TSA), which creates images that show dynamic blood flow without using contrast agents.

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