Demand for cardiology services will grow by 20 percent by 2025, according to a projection published in the November issue of Health Affairs, and radiology will experience an 18 percent bump.

Concerns that conversion of hospitals from not-for-profit to for-profit status compromises patient outcomes appear to be unfounded.

In an analysis of a subset of North American patients in the EINSTEIN-PE trial, Brahim Bookhart, director of Health Economics and Outcomes Research at Janssen Research & Development, and colleagues reported that patients who received rivaroxaban (Xarelto) had a shorter length of stay. That translated into savings of $2,040 per patient.

Implementing a comprehensive cardiac rehabilitation (CR) program may ultimately cut costs by reducing the number of hospital readmissions and lowering mortality from cardiovascular disease, according to study results presented Oct. 17 at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress in Montreal.

Strategies to control rhythm and control rate in patients with atrial fibrillation and heart failure do not differ significantly in terms of costs, according to a study published in the October issue of the Canadian Journal of Cardiology. The total per-patient costs were approximately $70,581 USD for rhythm control and $76,404 USD for rate control.

Although there has been a push toward making data from clinical trials more widely available, a study published online Oct. 8 in PLOS Medicine found that unpublished clinical study reports (CSRs) provide more complete information related to patient outcomes than publicly available information.

Identifying patients with low-risk chest pain who can safely be discharged early may be possible using a new set of diagnostic procedures, leading to lower costs and better patient outcomes. A study published online Oct. 7 in JAMA: Internal Medicine found that an experimental strategy nearly doubled the amount of patients discharged from the emergency department to outpatient care within six hours.

Robot-assisted mitral valve repair surgery was no more costly than open surgery, once a hospital initiated process improvements. What’s more, patients who underwent robotic surgery had a shorter length of stay, especially after innovations in the hospital’s systems were in place.