Dear AuntMinnie Member,
The Massachusetts state legislature is going where U.S. regulators have feared to tread -- by introducing a bill that would ban physician self-referral for MRI, PET, and linear accelerator studies.
House Bill 2711 would ban physicians and physician groups from referring patients to nonhospital-based healthcare facilities for MRI, PET, and linac procedures if the physician or group holds direct or indirect ownership or investment interest in the facility. We're featuring an article on the bill in our MRI Digital Community.
The legislation could potentially yield the first state ban on in-office physician self-referral. Radiology advocates believe the practice is siphoning away referrals from imaging groups while causing healthcare costs to rise due to increased utilization by physicians who order imaging studies on their own machines.
Could the bill be a harbinger of things to come as self-referral opponents, increasingly frustrated at the federal level, take their case to state legislatures? Find out by clicking here.
In other MRI-related news, 3-tesla imaging offers improved signal-to-noise and contrast-to-noise ratios compared to 1.5-tesla scanning, according to a presentation at this week's Society of Computed Body Tomography and Magnetic Resonance (SCBT/MR) meeting in Phoenix. A number of issues could mitigate 3-tesla's advantages, however -- find out more by clicking here.
Read about these stories and more by visiting our MRI Digital Community, at mri.auntminnie.com.
