While Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., takes a seriocomic tone in his collection of essays, the ACC.10 clinical trials and education presentations that garnered the most attention from our readers were mainly focused on the potential for new or better therapies, which are not currently or widely available. These trialers are giving new methods an intellectual shake of sorts through well-designed evaluations.

Cost-profiling tools produce misleading results and often misclassify physician performance, according to a RAND Corporation report published March 18 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

McKesson's Horizon Cardiology cardiovascular information system (CVIS) now offers hosted storage solutions for data protection, archive and disaster recovery, in addition to virtualized server solutions. The company announced these new options for Horizon version 12.1, a single-database CVIS, during ACC.10 in Atlanta.

Kardia Health Systems and Munich-based TomTec Imaging Systems have formed a new partnership to deliver TomTecs multi-modality cardiovascular image analysis technology as a part of Kardia Complete, its forthcoming web-based service for workflow in cardiology practices.

Coding and documentation is often the chink in a facilitys armor. Issues such as improper documentation, overcoding and a lack of communication between coders and physicians can often steer facilities into a coding rut, said Linda Gates-Striby, CCS-P, compliance manager at the Care Group in Indianapolis, during a presentation Tuesday at the American College of Cardiology (ACC) scientific sessions.

QATLANTA - Originally piloted two years ago as the Improving Continuous Cardiac Care IC3 registry, the recently rebranded PINNACLE registry is the first and only ambulatory registry for cardiovascular conditions in this country, noted William Oetgen, MD, clinical associate professor of medicine at Georgetown University, at the 59th annual American College of Cardiology (ACC) annual conference on March 16.

ATLANTA--Referring PCI patients for cardiac rehabilitation can help improve care; however, the rates of referral remain low and large disparities exist between hospital sites, said Krishna G. Aragam, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, during a poster presentation at the 59th annual American College of Cardiology (ACC) scientific sessions.

Rising costs to hospitals accounted for 64 percent of the overall growth in spending on hospital care between 2004 and 2008, according to a report issued this month by the American Hospital Association (AHA).