Healthcare is ever changing, so it’s important to stay up to date on advancements and issues that may impact the development, operation, maintenance, and growth of your services. Here are some important developments:
Do hospitals still make sense? The case for decentralization of health care
From their humble origins as charitable almshouses for the poor and destitute who could not afford to receive care at home, hospitals have evolved into large, profitable, expensive, technology-laden institutions at the epicenter of the health care universe. Almost every community has at least one general centralized hospital, and most have more than one — with those that don’t being considered “underserved” or “frontier” communities, and with the hospitals in such communities sometimes receiving the designation of “critical access.” But health care is changing and until recently, centralizing care around a hospital made sense. Continue reading…
Las Vegas brain institute takes on unique Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s project
In the only trial of its kind in the United States, a Las Vegas doctor is injecting patients with a radioactive liquid and scanning their brains in hopes of discovering the cause of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Dr. Aaron Ritter at the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to test the GE180 tracer in humans to research neurodegeneration. Continue reading…
SNMMI, ACNM oppose relaxing radiopharma user rules
The Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) and the American College of Nuclear Medicine (ACNM) have submitted a joint statement opposing any changes in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) training and experience requirements for healthcare personnel to administer radiopharmaceuticals. The NRC is pondering the creation of a “limited user” category for physicians with little or no background in nuclear medicine. While no formal framework is in place, it is anticipated that the training and experience requirements to become a limited user would be much less rigorous than the current standards for authorized users and other nuclear medicine practitioners. Continue reading…
Prior authorizations still a pain for patients, practices, survey finds
Insurance prior authorizations for certain drugs, tests and treatments continue to burden medical practices and could negatively affect patient outcomes, according to new survey results from the American Medical Association.The survey took place in December, 2018 among 1,000 practicing physicians. Here are the top seven findings. Continue reading…
18Fluorocholine-PET/CT demonstrates better clinical utility than conventional prostate imaging
First-line imaging with 18fluorocholine-PET/CT demonstrated more clinical utility than conventional imaging for identifying prostate lesions with a high impact on patient management, according to results of a randomized trial presented at Genitourinary Cancers Symposium. However, researchers did not observe an increase in prognostic performance with the different imaging modality, and both approaches appeared to have a poor negative predictive value. Continue reading…
