The health IT pendulum swings back and forth. We started with mainframe-based dumb terminals and centralized Big Iron systems with monolithic architectures and no electronic data sharing.

California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones has decided to intervene in a "qui tam" (whistleblower) lawsuit against Bristol Myers-Squibb (BMS). The lawsuit is the largest health insurance fraud case ever pursued by a California state agency.

Among patients with three-vessel or left main coronary artery disease, there was greater relief from angina after CABG than after PCI at six and 12 months, although the extent of the benefit was small, according to the quality-of-life data that emerged from the SYNTAX trial, which was published in the March 17 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Global Harmonization Task Force (GHTF), a collaborative organization between regulators and medical imaging and health IT manufacturers from North America, Europe and Japan, has disbanded after a 19-year stint.

Artificially intelligent (AI) neural networks demonstrate strong sensitivity and specificity in the detection of liver cancer using PET/CT, while also improving the accuracy of interpreting radiologists who took the networks findings into account, suggesting an important future adjunct role for the systems in cancer detection, according to a study published in the March issue of Radiology.

A recent report by the Millennium Research Group, which predicted increases in imaging device sales as a result of healthcare reform, got some upbeat reinforcement this week, when market research firm Kalorama announced new predictions for growth in a related field in a report. Whats good for advanced visualization, is, apparently, also good for virtual reality.

Patients receiving triple-antiplatelet therapy after long zotarolimus-eluting stent implantation had decreased extent of late luminal loss, percent intimal hyperplasia volume and angiographic restenosis, resulting in a reduced risk of one-year target lesion revascularization compared with patients receiving dual-antiplatelet therapy, according to the DECLARE-LONG trial in the March 15 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

While most may think that adding physicians to the hospital staff will increase hospital volume, capture more referrals and improve coordinated care, researchers found that this type of integration may actually result in higher healthcare costs, according to a Community Report of the Greenville-Spartanburg, S.C., metropolitan area carried out by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC).