August 28, 2015 — BioControl Medical said it has completed enrollment in its INOVATE-HF (INcrease Of VAgal TonE in Heart Failure) clinical trial evaluating the CardioFit system for the treatment of congestive heart failure (HF). INOVATE-HF has enrolled a total of 725 patients at 86 centers in the United States and Europe, making it the largest prospective, randomized device study to evaluate the treatment of HF with vagus nerve stimulation.

In the midst of a growing trend for Medicare patients to receive observation care in the hospital to determine if they should be formally admitted, a new study from researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania shows that for more than a quarter of beneficiaries with multiple observation stays, the cumulative out-of-pocket costs of these visits exceeds the deductible they would have owed for an inpatient hospital admission.

August 27, 2015 — The use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling has been used for years to better engineer large machines such as aircraft and automobiles, but its application is now being turned toward implantable medical devices such as stents, stent grafts and heart valves. Last November, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first medical technology that uses CFD to create noninvasive fraction flow reserve (FFR) measurements of blood flow through coronary lesions based on a computed tomography (CT) scan.