Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., released a Call to Action plan on Wednesday, detailing his vision for healthcare reform, highlighting access to care, unsustainable costs and a lack of quality assurances that currently plague the U.S. healthcare system.

Despite higher drug costs, aggregate hospital and 30-day costs were lowest with bivalirudin monotherapy, making the anticoagulant an economically attractive alternative to heparin plus glycoprotein IIb/IIIa receptor inhibitors (GPI) for patients with moderate- and high-risk acute coronary syndrome, according to a prospective analysis of the ACUITY trial in the Nov. 25 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) secured $1.34 billion in settlements and judgments in its 2008 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, through the pursuit of healthcare fraud cases. This brings total recoveries since 1986, when Congress substantially strengthened the civil False Claims Act, to more than $21 billion, according to the DoJ.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California have devised a way to obtain repeated snapshots of the location and survival of infected or diseased cells in a living human patient months and possibly years later, according to a case study published online Nov. 18 in Nature Clinical Practice Oncology.

Although turf wars sometimes abound among cardiologists and radiologists, the collaboration of the specialties holds the promise of creating a mutually beneficial relationship, according to Peter L. Zwerner, MD.

Patients treated for locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer who receive chemotherapy and proton beam therapy have fewer instances of bone marrow toxicity than patients who receive the standard treatment of intensity-modulated radiation (IMRT) and concurrent chemotherapy, according to findings reported Nov. 13 at the Chicago Multidisciplinary Symposium in Thoracic Oncology.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., released a Call to Action plan on Wednesday, detailing his vision for health reform in the 111th Congress, which highlights access to care, unsustainable costs and a lack of quality assurances that currently plague the U.S. healthcare system.

The American Health Information Community (AHIC), a U.S. advisory committee established in 2005 to offer recommendations to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Mike Leavitt to accelerate the adoption of healthcare IT, formally concluded its work this week.