Payment structures influence dental radiography utilisation?

NHS dentists were traditionally paid for individual “items of treatment”: each X-ray they took resulted in a payment. In England, the number of X-rays taken in 2003/04 averaged 53.2 per 100 “courses of treatment”. Since 2006, however, NHS dentists in England have not received payments for individual X-rays, but only for completed courses of treatment. Preliminary results for 2007/08 show that the number of X-rays taken by dentists in England has decreased to 31.5 per 100 courses of treatment. In Scotland, by contrast, where the traditional method of payment for dentists continues, there has been no equivalent reduction.

Margaret McCarthy
Financial Times 11 April 2009
link
blogs.ft.com/mccartney

Screening for occult cancer in idiopathic DVT?

From:

Should patients with venous thrombosis have cancer screening?

RK Patel

Thrombus, 2009 Apr. Volume 13, Number 1.

http://www.thrombus.co.uk/thrombus/View_article.asp?AID=1988

Other Refs:

Venous Thromboembolism and Occult Malignancy: Simultaneous Detection During Pulmonary CT Angiography with CT Venography
Bierry et al. Am. J. Roentgenol 2008; 191: 885-889
DOI:10.2214/AJR.07.3516
http://www.ajronline.org/cgi/content/abstract/191/3/885

Occult malignancy in patients with venous thromboembolism: risk indicators and a...
Oktar et al. Phlebology.2007; 22: 75-79
http://phleb.rsmjournals.com/cgi/content/abstract/22/2/75

Screening for occult cancer in patients with acute venous thromboembolism.
Monreal M, Trujillo-Santos J.
Curr Opin Pulm Med. 2007 Sep;13(5):368-71.

[Occult cancer and venous thromboembolism: which screening in patients with inaugural deep vein thrombosis?]
Pathol Biol (Paris). 2008 Jun;56(4):205-10.
Lévesque H.[Article in French]

Recently completed trial:

Screening for Occult Malignancy in Idiopathic Venous Thromboembolism (Univeristy of Padova)

http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00361647

Twitter

MidEssexRay is now tweeting at http://twitter.com/midessexray .
My tweets are on the top of this blog.

Other radiology tweets include
http://twitter.com/scanman
http://twitter.com/radrounds

There are discussions about twitter in medicine here and here , and here is a link to a list of medical tweets.

More on Speech Recognition

We've been using it for a while.
I like it but I'm the first to admit that there are problems, one of which is errors in transcription, aggravated by the fact that I'm not a very good proofreader.

Here's an interesting post from Dr Dalai discussing recent publications in the literature.
Speech Recognition Sucks and it Costs More

Picture of robot sculptures by Clayton Bailey from
http://www.c2i.ntu.edu.sg/AI+CI/Resources/AI_Artwork/RobotSculptures-Bailey97.html

www.academicproductivity.com

I found this site while googling "online reference management software". It's a blog with lots of interesting articles, for those who are interested in such things.
Apart from periodic reviews on reference managers, other articles I liked were:
Stop Powerpointing and Start Outlining in which the author points out the disadvantages of using powerpoint to plan your talk, and suggests n alternative method,
and a discussion of a post from Luis Ahn discussing the difference between research and publishing papers.

http://www.academicproductivity.com/

So does it matter if your workforce is unhappy?

Almost one half of radiologists actively interpreting mammograms do not enjoy that part of their job. Reported enjoyment was not related to performance

Radiologists' performance and their enjoyment of interpreting screening mammograms.

Geller BM, Bowles EJ, Sohng HY, Brenner RJ, Miglioretti DL, Carney PA, Elmore JG.

AJR Am J Roentgenol. 2009 Feb;192(2):361-9.
Link

Portable CT scanner

I came across this product on the internet: The CereTom 8-slice portable CT scanner.

Radiographer ghholt has a picture of it on Flickr parked in a hospital corridor with the comment

When I started CT Scanning 28 years ago I never thought I would ever be pushing a portable again. Now all the CT Tech's out there have something to look forward to...

"Seeing real people"

A study presented at the RSNA suggests that the performance of radiologists is improved when they have a picture of the patient whose examination is being reported. 

Hmm...

Source:

The Placebo Journal blog

Wall Street Journal