Improve population health. Optimize the patient experience. And do both while cutting costs. That, of course, is the “Triple Aim,” the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s boiled-down recipe for putting the Affordable Care Act into action at the provider level. And where does radiology fit into the formula? 

Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Analytics has published a report on some of the technologies shaping hospitals’ purchase plans in 2016.

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.