The Senate confirmed Robert McDonald to head the Department of Veterans Affairs last week, just after congressional leaders put together a $17 billion funding bill to help reform the agency. 

In an NPR story, some professional societies and associations expressed concern over a new report from the Insitute of Medicine that calls for more accountability in the distribution of funding for medical graduate education. 

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced late last week that October 1, 2015, is officially the new transition date for the International Classification of Diseases 10th Revision (ICD-10) coding system in healthcare claims. 

Since the announcement of the ICD-10 delay earlier this year, many healthcare providers have questioned the need to continue spending on staff and physician training. Additionally, some questioned whether ICD-10 would be implemented at all, and the transition would simply be made to the ICD-11 coding. An article in the current issue of the Journal of AHIMA addresses some of the most common concerns surrounding ICD-10 and intends to dispel several misconceptions.

Two of the nation’s most well-known healthcare organizations, Johns Hopkins Medicine and Kaiser Permanente, announced a strategic collaboration that joins one’s academic research and clinical capabilities with the other’s expertise in population health management.

A recent study published in the journal Cancer concluded that patient anxiety associated with a false positive lung-cancer screening was no greater at one and six months post-screening than that of patients who received a negative result.

The current physician piecemeal reimbursement model ultimately drives up the costs of healthcare according to Sandeep Jauhar, MD. In a New York Times editorial he explains that while overutilization is certainly a factor, cutting payments to physicians is a self-defeating strategy, forcing them to increase the number of patients they see, which reduces the amount of time spent with each one. Busy doctors call on others to help with the patient load, often times specialists who may order more tests, driving up costs. "There is no more wasteful entity in medicine than a rushed doctor," says Jauhar.  

Nine years ago, when radiologist Kevin Barker, MD, joined the solo practice of Dr. Anson Cone, Community Radiology Associates (CRA) covered one imaging center and one rural hospital, and enjoyed high regard from referring physicians in the Texas Hill Country, a vast, 25-county region marked by rugged hills separating Austin from San Antonio.