A Medical Device Daily

Biophan Technologies (West Henrietta, New York), a company with the goal of making all biomedical devices capable of safely and successfully working with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), reported the allocation this week of $1 million in development funding from the U.S. government to further the development of the Myo-Vad cardiac support system.

On June 20, the House of Representatives passed the 2007 Department of Defense Appropriations Bill. As part of this bill, the House approved the expenditure of $1 million for the development of Myotech 's (Dedham, Massachusetts) minimally invasive cardiac-assist device to increase survival rates of patients suffering from heart failure.

Additionally, NYSTAR, the New York State Office of Sci-ence, Technology and Academic Research, provided $309,000 in equipment which has been delivered and is being used at Alfred University in support of Biophan's nanomagnetic particle research and development in both MRI imaging and drug delivery.

“We are very pleased to see this validation of the importance and value of our R&D in the Myotech Myo-Vad and MRI safety areas. Biophan is in decisively better strategic shape than a year ago. We are also negotiating new licensing contracts with several of the mega-companies in the medical fields of electrical stimulation of the heart, brain and spine,” said Michael Weiner, Biophan CEO.

HealthDataInsights (HDI; Las Vegas), a provider of medical claims overpayment identification and recoupment services, reported that it was recently awarded a “major” federal contract by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS; Baltimore).

HealthDataInsights was selected as the federal Medicaid Payment Error Rate Measurement (PERM) review contractor by CMS. The purpose of the CMS PERM project is to produce a national level error rate for the Medicaid Fee-For-Service program.

Under the Improper Payments Information Act of 2002, CMS and other federal executive agencies are mandated to review all programs and activities annually, identify those that may be susceptible to significant improper payments, estimate the amount of those improper payments, and report the results to Congress.

State and federal Medicaid outlays in CMS fiscal 2005 totaled more than $300 billion.

This year is the first in which CMS has employed a federal review contractor, HealthDataInsights, to analyze and evaluate the Medicaid payment error rate through a nationwide sample of Medicaid claims. HDI recently commenced work on Medicaid claims in the first 17 states selected for review.

Work performed by HDI under the PERM contract will include analyzing Medicaid fee-for-service claims to determine whether they were coded, documented and processed correctly; whether they were medically necessary; and whether they were properly paid or denied. HDI then will work with the review states to re-price the incorrectly paid or denied claims.