The DXA provision requires Medicare to reimburse DXA during 2010 and 2011 at no less than 70 percent of the 2006 rates, providing that $98 amount.

"Before this happened, there was a lot of doom and gloom. People were saying, not only were the rates going to stay low, but there was another 18 percent cut coming. That cut was essentially a done deal according to everyone," says David Denholtz, president of BoneDensitometers.com, a division of Fort Myers, Fla.-based Integrity Medical Systems, Inc. "It was coming on March 1 and then it was tabled by Congress and the health bill came out and surprise, surprise. This is huge for people performing DXA scans and huge for people like us, who are entrenched in the market and have such a major investment in the market."


The reimbursement increase makes it more available to patients because it should once again be a financially viable service for primary care doctors to provide.

"Every person's skeleton completely reforms every 10 years and depending on our eating habits and lifestyles, sometimes these changes happen for the worse and not the better," says Leon A. Gugel, president of Long Island City-based Metropolis International. "Bone density testing is a very important modality as osteoporosis becomes a mainstream focus of many doctors and hospitals and even research facilities."

The reimbursement is also changing positively for VFA, where it is increasing to approximately $27.

VFA stands for Vertebral Fracture Assessment, which is a test that looks at the individual bones in your back, called vertebral bodies, to see if any of them have an abnormal shape. If the height of one of these bones is less than expected, it could be due to a vertebral fracture.

"The new health care bill will increase both DXA and VFA reimbursement, while a study is being done about reimbursement," says Sarah L. Morgan, director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham Osteoporosis Prevention and Treatment Clinic and president elect of ISCD. "VFA is also something people are interested in. It gives people the opportunity to evaluate for compression fractures within the DXA room."

Controlling the Industry
When it comes to new equipment, industry experts believe that the sector is divided just about evenly between OEMs Hologic and the Lunar Division of GE Healthcare.




The GE iDXA is the company's top dual-energy X-Ray absorptiometry scanner and GE's Lunar Prodigy Advance utilizes the industry's first direct-digital detector array.

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