Business

In a conspiracy that provided recruitment to homeless people as phony patients and thereafter illegally billing Medicare and Medi-Cal for services, the FBI agents today arrested the CEO of City of Angels hospital, Rudra Sabaratnam along with Estill Mitts, the operator of a Skid Row health assessment center

Fake Medicare and Medi-Cal bills were submitted for reimbursement by the hospitals in Los Angeles and Orange counties for services provided to homeless patients - including drug addicts and the mentally ill. The homeless people were recruited from "Skid Row", FBI investigations unearthed.

People with minor problems such as dehydration, exhaustion or yeast infections and in fact, did not require hospitalization were allegedly admitted to hospitals for as long as three days and billed the government for the stays.

Search warrants were served at City of Angeles Medical Center, Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center and Tustin Hospital and Medical Center as a result of their investigation, FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller revealed

For many of us, the mention of a pathologistdefine inevitably brings to mind a person in a white coat bending over a microscope, glass slides in hand. However, that is soon to be passé. For Omnyx, a collaborative venture of GE Healthcare and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center seeks to develop and sell advanced digital imaging systems for pathologists.

For more than a decade, both GE Healthcare and UPMC have individually played important roles in transforming the practice of radiology from hard-copy film to digitized images. Now the two have come together to merge their clinical and technological expertise to bring about radical changes in the field of pathology.

Cutting edge technology has played a vital part in enhancing testing procedures. Advancing the technology for digitizing pathological images is one area of work. The current digital pathology technology requires about 3 to 5 minutes to scan a single glass slide's image. According to GE Healthcare sources, Omnyx developments will reduce the scanning time of each slide to 15 or 30 seconds.

The UK's Multiple Sclerosis Society affirmed that frampridine, a drug used to treat the disease, can dramatically improve living conditions for some patients.

The wonder drug has been approved in its next test stage, manufacturers claim. The drug company Acorda tested frampridine on 240 MS patients, out of which two-fifths of these confirmed progress. Now Acorda is planning to obtain a US safety license by 2009.

MS patients encounter great difficulty in access to their daily needs due to mobility problems and wheelchairs have to support many of them to move around routinely.

Immune systemdefine of the body lets a fatty protein called myelin insulate the signals to nerves. This condition results in hazy eyesight, problems in balancing body and weakness in the limbs.