NHIC, a subsidiary of HP, has been awarded a $72.3 million, five-year contract renewal by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to continue servicing durable medical equipment (DME) suppliers in 11 northeastern U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has released a policy regarding the secure use of web-based collaboration and social media tools.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded $11 million to Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, N.H., to propel the field of quantitative biology. Its work will look at how genes and the environment combine to cause disease while also assessing ways to employ the combination in coming up with cures.

Advanced Medical Isotope Corporation (AMIC), a developer and distributor of medical isotopes, has entered into a strategic relationship with Spivak Management and Mann Healthcare Partners to form a joint venture to develop and execute AMIC's business strategy.

Transthoracic needle lung biopsy (CT-guided biopsy) was complicated by pneumothorax in 15 percent of cases, according to a study published Aug. 1 in Annals of Internal Medicine. The findings of fairly common complications led the authors to call for physicians to present patients with more information about the risks and benefits of pulmonary nodule biopsy.

Slowly but steadily, radiation oncologists are adopting PET and PET/CT to measure the early response of cancers to radiotherapy and other treatments. And progress has been significant.

The cover story in this issue discusses the role of PET imaging for assessing therapeutic responses in cancer. Over the past 15 years, a large body of evidence has demonstrated that FDG-PET imaging is uniquely useful to assess treatment responses in cancer patients.

The lead author of a new study that showed a clear racial gap in funding for biomedical research suggests that the disparity is not deliberate, but still does damage to both the unfunded researchers and U.S. healthcare on the whole.