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GE Buys Abbott Diagnostic Business for $8+B

Abbott today announced that it will sell its core laboratory diagnostics business included in the Abbott Diagnostics Division and Abbott Point of Care (formerly known as i-STAT) to General Electric for $8.13 billion in cash. The transaction excludes Abbott's Molecular Diagnostics and Diabetes Care (glucose monitoring) businesses. If regulatory authorities approve it, the deal is expected to be closed in the first half of the year. In 2004 Abbott spun off its hospital products business into a separate public company named Hospira. Meanwhile Siemens Medical is digesting its acquisitions of Diagnostic Products Corporation and Bayer Healthcare's Diagnostics Division. Earlier this month GE said it was buying aircraft control & diagnostic systems manufacturer Smiths Aerospace plc for $4.8 billion in cash. more...

January 18, 2007 Related topics: Mergers & Acquisitions, Diagnostic

Medicare to Publish Hospital Heart Care Benchmark

According to USA Today CMS is about to publish a comparison of heart attack and heart failure death rate on its Hospital Compare website. Right now the site gives access to data about various clinical practices known to improve outcomes such as the percentage of heart attack patients given aspirin at arrival. Last month nearly 4,000 facilities were told how their 30-day death rates for 2003 fared against national averages of 17.8 percent for heart attacks and 11.6 percent for heart failure. Next June data collected from July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2006 will make it on the site. The effort falls short of full transparency as the exact death rates won't be disclosed (whether it would be useful to do so is disputable) but readers will know whether any given hospital is below, at, or above the average. Gary Noskin of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago was quoted as saying: "It clearly needs to be done, but I'm not sure 30-day mortality is the right measure. A patient could have a heart attack (and be treated successfully) and get hit by a bus after he leaves the hospital." Medicare says its methodology focuses on patterns of care, not individual cases. See also: New York State Published Loads of Hospital Data. more...

January 10, 2007 Related topics: Quality, Safety, Errors

U.S. Healthcare Bill Higher but Growth Slower

At 6.9 percent in 2005, growth in healthcare spending in the United States has declined for the third...

Radiologists Say Speech Recognition Does Work

Like handwriting recognition, software-based speech recognition seems to have been three years away from being really effective for...

AAA Screening Now Covered by Medicare

In February 2005 U.S. Representative John Shimkus (R- IL) introduced the Screening Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms Very Efficiently (SAAAVE)...

Contingency Planning Needs to Assume the Worst

In this month’s cover story, Health Data Management provides a detailed look into how several hospitals coped with...

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