Hospitals that put patients under the knife more frequently see higher overall costs, according to a study published online May 10 in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. The researchers identified intensity of tests, medication use and services as some of the culprits and said that there may be room for improvement in these hospitals to reduce the use of these modalities and cut costs.

In recent years, there has been great demand to prove the value of health imaging though published cost-utility analyses, but while these studies generally focus on the impact of interventions in terms of quality-adjusted life-years, they often overlook the intrinsic value of imaging unrelated to treatment, according to an article published in the May issue of Academic Radiology.

Adding digital breast tomosynthesis to 2D mammography screening results in a 40 percent reduction in patient recall rates compared to routine screening mammography alone, according to a study presented May 3 at the annual meeting of the American Roentgen Ray Society (ARRS) in Vancouver.

In the years after the passage of the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act (DRA), which reduced Medicare payments for selected in-office imaging procedures, overall growth of Medicare noninvasive musculoskeletal imaging slowed. However, a closer examination shows the slowdown was a continuation of a trend started before the DRA, and growth of nonradiographic noninvasive musculoskeletal imaging performed by nonradiologists still grew more rapidly than that performed by radiologists, according to a study published online April 24 in Radiology.

Cost trends in U.S. healthcare consistently increase at about 2.5 percentage points faster than the general rate of inflation clearly an unsustainable rate, according to an April report from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Oncology providers and payors can be brought together in a large, statewide consortium to effectively measure quality and improve care, so long as the cost burden of quality improvement initiatives are borne by payors in the group, according to two articles published in the April issue of Health Affairs.

Greater involvement of patients, clinicians and others in the healthcare community in developing clinical comparative effectiveness research (CER) studies could reduce clinical uncertainty, speed adoption of meaningful findings and make such studies more useful in clinical decision-making, according to an article published in the April 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Virtual Radiologic (vRad) Radiology Alliance partner, Diagnostic Imaging Inc., has been joined by Radiology Associates of New Jersey, a radiology group covering seven locations in Southern New Jersey.