A radiology partnership is claiming in federal court that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, slated to begin enforcing penalties for Meaningful Use noncompliance in 2015, is “irrational” and should be declared unconstitutional, according to Courthouse News Service.

University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Centerand Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Medicine announce today that internationally renowned cardiothoracic surgeon, Soon J. Park, MD, will join the two institutions October 14. Dr. Park will serve as the Chief of Cardiac Surgery at UH Case Medical Center, Co-director of the UH Harrington Heart & Vascular Instituteand the Jay C. Ankeney Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery and Professor of Surgery at CWRU School of Medicine. The Case Western Reserve appointments are pending final approval from the university’s Board of Trustees.

Continuing its tradition and commitment to providing health care professionals with convenient mobile access to the information they need at the point of care, Epocrates, Inc., an athenahealth company (Nasdaq:ATHN), today unveiled the new Epocrates Provider Directory. Now, Epocrates members can quickly and easily identify other clinicians for consultations and patient referrals. Historically, Epocrates has built its brand on a one-to-one relationship with its members. With the Provider Directory, Epocrates is laying the foundation for its members to connect with each other.

Practice Fusion, the nation's largest electronic health record (EHR) platform, today announced a guarantee that its free EHR will be 2014 Meaningful Use-ready by the end of 2013. With 100,000 medical professionals currently active each month, the company will instantly become the largest population of physicians equipped for Meaningful Use Stage 2 when certification testing is completed later this year. The guarantee is backed with an offer to pay up to $5,000 in EHR costs for any new customer who switches to a different EHR if Practice Fusion's certification timing is not met.

Illinois Farmers Insurance and its subsidiaries have filed a $1.9 million federal lawsuit against Edina, Minn.-based Mobile Diagnostic Imaging, Inc., its owner, and its referring chiropractors. The diagnostic imaging provider is accused of orchestrating an elaborate kickback scheme intended to defraud Minnesota’s no-fault insurance system. 

Online search tools may be helpful in predicting United States medical school graduates’ interest, or lack thereof,  in radiology residency positions, finds a study published online Oct. 11 in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

The past week has not been a good one for medical research.

A sham research paper purposely loaded with easily identifiable errors was submitted to more than 300 open access journals as part of a sting operation. Despite the flaws in the paper, 157 journals accepted it, according to a report published in the October issue of Science.