Hot MedFax

This will come as a big surprise.  Hospitals offer tests patients don't really need. According to a story by Julie Appleby, hoping to attract patients and promote good will in the community, hospitals "are teaming up with medical-screening companies to promote tests they say might prevent deadly strokes or heart disease." But they're not just offering them to people who might become sick but to those without symptoms or other risk factors.  In other words, these tests are totally useless for many and could prove harmful.  In a lot of cases, they're being given just to make money. Appleby quotes a government panel that notes that these tests find "too few problems" when weighed against the drawbacks -- unnecessary CT or MRI scans, biopsies, sometimes even surgeries. And guess what else?  The tests increase healthcare costs. “A lot that ends up being found is clinically of no importance at all,” Steven Weinberger, executive vice president and chi...

Want to know what a Heme-8 Lab costs? Or a Heme-8 with Automated Differentiated Lab?  They're each $9.37 at Johns Hopkins and it may not matter to you what they are (blood tests for diseases like lupus and others), or how much they cost. But it's starting to, for doctors, and it's helping to bring down healthcare costs, according to Sarah Kliff at The Washington Post.  She reports that, "for six months, doctors ordering certain lab tests" were able to "call up both the type of the test," and what Medicare would pay for it. It's actually caused doctors to order almost 10% fewer tests, Kliff notes.  Once the hospital started studying the costs, and relaying them to doctors, it saved $3.79 per test per day per patient.  That may not sound like much, but times thousands of patients, it's paying off. Kliff writes that doctors were not penalized for writing orders for more expensive tests, the price just got billed to the insurance company (and w...