Bush administration throws its support behind healthcare IT

The President's Information Technology Advisory Committee has proposed a set of recommendations that would enhance support for healthcare IT.

The panel, among its proposals, advocated a cost-benefit study of using Snomed clinical terms, rather than switching to international classification of Diseases-10-Clinical Modifications coding systems in the proposed upgrade from the ICD-9 code set currently used.

That recommendation comes in the wake of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics' request that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) adopt ICD-10 to replace ICD-9 code sets as the new transactions and code sets under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).

Advocates for the change say Snomed is more descriptive in the recording of clinical terms than the ICD-10 code set.

The committee also recommended that the federal government hike its support for projects to estimate costs and benefits of the national health infrastructure initiative and electronic health records investments and practices.

Around the web

The nuclear imaging isotope shortage of molybdenum-99 may be over now that the sidelined reactor is restarting. ASNC's president says PET and new SPECT technologies helped cardiac imaging labs better weather the storm.

CMS has more than doubled the CCTA payment rate from $175 to $357.13. The move, expected to have a significant impact on the utilization of cardiac CT, received immediate praise from imaging specialists.

The newly cleared offering, AutoChamber, was designed with opportunistic screening in mind. It can evaluate many different kinds of CT images, including those originally gathered to screen patients for lung cancer. 

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