AT&T has signed an agreement with telehealth services developer Valued Relationships (VRI) for a remote patient monitoring service to assist with the management of chronic diseases.

The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) ruled May 1 that it would cover transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) under its Coverage with Evidence Development, but the agency included a series of conditions that must be met to receive reimbursement.

CT-induced cancer is always a concern when imaging younger patients, but an analysis of radiation risks has shown that young patients who undergo chest or abdominopelvic CT are more than 35 times more likely to die of their disease than develop a radiation-induced cancer, according to a study presented May 1 at the annual meeting of the American Roentgen Ray Society in Vancouver.

NEWTON, Mass.Everyone has their professional trials. Is yours your device alarm system? As more devices infiltrate hospitals, many are becoming too sensitive and triggering false-positive alarms that plague staff, said Mary L. White, RN, MBA, senior risk manager at Brigham & Womens Hospital in Boston, during an April 26 presentation at the 22nd Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Nursing sponsored by the American Heart Association (AHA).

An array of historical and global approaches provides viable models for developing local policies to promote and improve radiation safety among pediatric patients, according to a commentary published in the May issue of American Journal of Roentgenology.

With hundreds of thousands of devices on the market, malfunctions are always a possibility. This week, Boston Scientifics Cognis and Teligen defibrillators are under fire after it was found that the transformer component may malfunction and may have led to a patient death.

Source: Radiology 2012;263:537-546Iterative reconstruction of pediatric chest and abdominal CT images nearly halved radiation dose, while maintaining image quality and diagnostic confidence, according to a study published in the May issue of Radiology.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has alerted the FDA that, if the agency is to bring its IT environment up to snuff, it needs to take three essential steps: develop a comprehensive inventory of its IT systems, implement an integrated master schedule for a particular modernization effort already underway and identify opportunities to get better at sharing data with internal and external partners.