Abbott will separate into two different publicly traded companies: the medical product manufacturer will split into a diversified medical products company and the other company will be focused on research-based pharmaceuticals.

Policy proposals to adopt prior authorization for advanced medical imaging as a means of controlling utilization would not provide meaningful cost savings, according to a literature review by The Moran Company. The report, released by the Access to Medical Imaging Coalition, evaluated the cost savings of various proposed imaging policies and found that the Congressional Budget Office is unlikely to score significant savings for these strategies.

Hospitals awarded five stars by HealthGrades in 2011 provided better care than their lower-scoring counterparts. According to a HealthGrades report released Oct. 18, patients had a 73 percent lower risk of dying in a five-star hospital than in a one-star hospital.

As the conditions of participation in Medicare and Medicaid have not changed since 1986, the time has come for a full review. That's according to softly stated yet hard-hitting commentary published online Oct. 18 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Two decades ago, hospitals preventive maintenance (PM) strategies focused on upholding the electrical integrity of medical devices. In the years since, clinical engineering departments have been tailoring more advanced PM strategies. In the most forward-looking hospitals and healthcare systems, risk-based methods include careful evaluation of equipment inventories to decide if, when and how often to intervene throughout the lifecycle of many thousands of devices.

Before becoming a medical journalist, I was an amateur guitar technician; emphasis on the word "amateur."

Healthcare services and medical devices attracted the largest share of "angel" investments in the first and second quarters of 2011, garnering 25 percent of all such investments, according to a report by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire.

HP and Lucile Packard Childrens Hospital at Stanford, Cali., have developed a patient status system that prompted a treatment change in one-third of patients during a single-center study.