The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as allowed by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, has deemed health insurance premium increases in five states unreasonable.

A discussion of radiation risks from medical imaging procedures should be accompanied by acknowledgement of the benefits of a given imaging procedure, according to the Message of the Month for December 2011, posted on the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) website.

The Access to Medical Imaging Coalition (AMIC) is urging the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) to consider the correlation between Medicare reimbursement and patient outcomes as it advises Congress about physician payments.

Two healthcare organizations in Grenoble, France, are using LabLogics Laura radio-chromatography system and instrumentation.

As the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services comb through reimbursement codes to identify potentially misvalued codes, radiology is disproportionately targeted, primarily because of the specialtys historic accuracy in coding, according to an article in the January issue of Journal of American College of Radiology. The article pinpointed three sources of bias against radiology services.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT announced that it will host the Healthy New Year Video Challenge and issued a call for video entries. 

Tuning in may be whats needed to tune out discomfort for men undergoing a prostate biopsies. A team of Duke Cancer Institute researchers found that noise-cancelling headphones playing a classical melody may reduce the pain and anxiety of the procedure, according to a study published in the January issue of Urology.

A pair of articles in the January issue of Radiology debated whether or not radiology departments need to develop an informed consent process that details the risk of medical radiation. Both groups of experts recognized that informed consent may not be ready for prime time, albeit for different reasons, and acknowledged the value of informed decision making.