Boston Scientific Corporation announced today that it has stopped shipment and is retrieving field inventory of all its implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) and cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators (CRT-Ds).

The Senate this week voted to expand the number of eligible physicians who might receive incentive payments for the meaningful use of health IT under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. This is welcome news for the wide range of clinicians who have asked for such an expansion, but its not the end of the discussion by any means.

A high percentage of CT and MRI examinations are not meeting appropriateness criteria and subsequently yielding negative results, which suggests a need for tools to help primary care physicians hone their imaging decision requests, according to a recent article in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

The Virginia State Legislature this week approved a bill mandating health insurers, healthcare subscription plans and health maintenance organizations (HMOs) to fully cover the cost of healthcare services provided through telemedicine services.

At the recent HIMSS10 conference in Atlanta, Intel announced its patient monitoring study with Mayo Clinic and introduced its Start Now initiative, a web portal that contains text and video statements by healthcare leaders about what they are doing to change the future of healthcare today.

HIMSS10 attendance was pegged at 27,500 as of March 3--this is not the final count--but it was up slightly from 2009 and about 1,600 short of the 2008 tally. For anyone who was there, 27,500 probably seems like an undercount: The Georgia World Congress Center, which is bigger than many city airports, was filled with enthusiastic attendees and vendors packed two halls. 

Royal Philips Electronics is collaborating with Microsoft to build on Philips Healthcares foundation of healthcare informatics and clinical decision support offerings at the point of care.

Setred introduced its 3D visualization solution developed for the medical industry, the Setred MD20-3D display and Samurai 3D medical imaging software, at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) 2010, in Vienna, from March 48.