Efforts to include more private insurers in Medicare may be costing the agency more money, new research shows.

On average, private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans were paid 12.4 percent more per enrollee in 2005 than what the same enrollees would have cost the traditional U.S. Medicare fee-for-service program, says a report released Thursday by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that supports independent research on health and social issues.

Two whistle-blowers sued the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Newark, alleging that senior officials there retaliated against the employees when they sought to block improper business practices. School representatives declined to immediately comment. Kathryn Gibbons, 48, a former finance official at the university’s 488-bed University Hospital, alleged in a lawsuit that her superiors ignored her complaints about improper billing and cost-reporting practices for years and then tried to cover them up.

NEC Display Solutions of America Inc.'s 57-inch MultiSync LCD5710 wide-screen monitor is one of the largest commercial LCDs available.

Ziehm’s Object Detected Dose Control feature for the Vision line of C-arms purportedly improves image quality with a low dose while also making the system easier to handle. The new real-time image control covers the whole field of view and provides independent object positioning within the field.

Brit Systems' clinical context object workgroup-enabled workstation, Brit Lite, uses vendor-independent HL7 CCOW standards to enable the viewing of medical images and reports within a patient context set by disparate clinical applications at the point of care.

Brit Systems' Roentgen Router is reportedly compatible with any vendor’s DICOM-compliant PACS or teleradiology system. The router provides auto-routing and prefetching of DICOM studies triggered by information in the exam order or study.

A web-enhanced telephone conference co-sponsored by NACVA and Reardon Consulting on Thursday, December 14 from 2-4 p.m. Eastern will address Pay for Performance (P4P) in physician healthcare reimbursements and its implications upon future value decisions.

Topics to be addressed include background of P4P and federal efforts, practical applications of P4P, and the legal parameters on health plan payments to providers to reward quality.

Agfa HealthCare announced today that Classic Hospitals, a group of 10 hospitals based in the United Kingdom, has signed a $2.9 million deal to install Agfa HealthCare’s Impax 6.2 PACS system. Additionally, Agfa’s computed radiography solution, the CR 35-X, will be installed in each facility to provide general and mammography digital services. The installation is expected to be completed by March.

Each of Classic Hospitals’ 10 facilities is multi-modality, including orthopaedics, gynecology, breast imaging and more.

A new study gauging the brain's response to product branding, presented today at the Radiological Society of North America’s annual meeting, has found that strong brands elicit strong activity in our brains.

A new ultrasound technique allows radiologists to distinguish benign from malignant breast lesions. Using elasticity imaging, researchers correctly identified both cancerous and harmless lesions in nearly all of the cases studied. The findings were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

Elasticity imaging is a modification of a routine ultrasound exam, like a manual self-exam, but more sensitive. The noninvasive technique works by gauging how much tissue moves when pushed, and it can detect how soft or stiff an object is.

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