Friday, June 17, 2011

News Alert: Hospitals Performed Needless Double CT Scans, Records Show

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Friday, June 17, 2011 -- 10:46 PM EDT
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Hospitals Performed Needless Double CT Scans, Records Show

Long after questions were first raised about the overuse of powerful CT scans, hundreds of hospitals across the country needlessly exposed patients to radiation by scanning their chests twice on the same day, according to federal records and interviews with researchers.

Performing two scans in succession is rarely necessary, radiologists say, yet some hospitals were doing that more than 80 percent of the time for their Medicare chest patients, according to Medicare outpatient claims from 2008, the most recent year available. The rate is typically less than 1 percent, or in some cases zero, at major university teaching hospitals.

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