by
Olga Deshchenko, DOTmed News Reporter | August 19, 2010
SNM was recently awarded a $48,000 grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to host a research development conference on the comparative effectiveness of PET and other modalities. The society plans to bring together imaging experts, regulatory entities, representatives of private health insurers and health technology assessment experts.
"Our goal is to develop a path to be able to do the right kind of studies and write the right kinds of papers to demonstrate cost effectiveness and comparative effectiveness where it exists," says Dr. Graham. "I very much want to be balanced in terms of identifying areas where it's not effective. This addresses the problem to some extent of inappropriate imaging," he says.
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The two-day conference will be held in the Washington D.C. area on July 21 and 22.
PET holds strong
Even though most major OEMs abandoned the manufacturing of the stand-alone PET system long ago, its popularity is growing. The heightened interest is due to the 2010 CMS changes in reimbursement rates. SPECT suffered a 20 percent cut, while PET reimbursement for myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) increased by 20 percent. The decrease in SPECT studies is further exacerbated by the shortage of technetium 99m, a radiopharmaceutical required for exam doses.
Siemens Biograph TruePoint PET/CT
"The extreme reduction of available doses has resulted in doctors having to cancel patients and therefore suffer [decrease in] revenue accordingly," says Joseph Oliverio, CTO of Positron Corporation, an Indiana-based molecular imaging company focused on nuclear cardiology. "This event, which will continue for some time, is a strong driving force moving doctors away from SPECT to PET."
Another boost of confidence for PET stems from research. In a 2009 study published in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, researchers set out to compare the diagnostic capabilities of SPECT and PET for MPI.
"We developed a technique where we could do both PET and SPECT on the same day and in conjunction with the same exact pharmacological stress episode," says Dr. James O'Donnell, one of the study's authors and nuclear medicine director of the University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Ohio.
