Dear AuntMinnie Member,
Up to 17 million women may lose insurance coverage for mammography screening if guidelines recently proposed by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) go into effect.
That's the conclusion of a new report issued this week by a research firm that calculated the impact of USPSTF's proposed new breast screening guidelines (which are actually the same as the old guidelines, but that's another story).
The problem is that the Affordable Care Act includes a provision stating that private payors don't have to cover mammography screening if it has a "C" rating from USPSTF -- which is exactly what the task force gave breast screening for women ages 40 to 49.
Thus, millions of women are set to lose their coverage if the guidelines go into effect -- unless some kind of legislative fix is made. Learn more by clicking here, or visit our Women's Imaging Community at women.auntminnie.com.
Fuji buys TeraMedica
On Tuesday, teleradiology services provider Virtual Radiologic announced a deal in which it would be acquired by Mednax; yesterday, the mergers and acquisitions in radiology continued with the announcement that vendor-neutral archive (VNA) developer TeraMedica has been acquired by Fujifilm Medical Systems USA.
Fuji has long been a provider of traditional PACS-based image management software, but the firm saw the TeraMedica acquisition as a good corporate fit as the market begins shifting toward VNA-based solutions. Read more about it by clicking here.
New image analysis start-up
In other news, an Israeli start-up firm thinks it may have built a better mousetrap when it comes to developing software-based tools for helping radiologists read medical images.
The company, Zebra Medical Vision, has created a database of 10 million imaging studies that have been tagged with relevant anatomy, pathology, etc. The database can be used to develop and fine-tune image analysis algorithms created by other firms for analyzing medical images.
Zebra believes its solution could lead to, for example, computer-aided detection algorithms that are more powerful than what's currently available because they have been tested on a larger database of studies. Learn more by clicking here, or visit our Advanced Visualization Community at av.auntminnie.com.
