Right Scan Right Time advocacy centers on our three core priorities access & coverage, patient safety, and innovation – ensuring patients can benefit from high-quality, safe, and ever-advancing imaging services.
Access & Coverage
Enhancing patient access to medical imaging matters. If patients can access innovative medical technology, it can help turn more patients into survivors — benefiting patients, aiding clinicians, guiding the right treatments, and saving money. That’s why our community supports policies that ensure patients receive the right scan at the right time.
The Health Tech Investment Act
Right Scan Right Time advocates have championed expanding access to innovative imaging technologies that help improve patients’ health. With the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) into medical technologies, it’s critical that Congress implement policies that reduce the barriers patients face to accessing advanced technologies already authorized by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA).
The Health Tech Investment Act would enable more patients to benefit from AI-enabled medical care. If enacted, this legislation would establish consistent and predictable Medicare payments to providers for the use of certain advanced AI. By creating a clear pathway for Medicare reimbursement for these technologies, more patients can access cutting-edge, personalized care from AI-powered medical devices.
While AI medical devices are proliferating and advancing in their capabilities, without reimbursement, patients will lack access. That’s where Congress can help.
It’s critical that Congress recognize the value that AI in medical imaging brings to patients. To support innovation, adoption, and access to these innovations, we need Congress to work with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to appropriately reimburse doctors who use FDA-authorized AI medical imaging tools.
To watch a video explanation of the Health Tech Investment Act, click here.
To read a letter sent by patient groups nationwide in support of the bill, click here.
Patient Safety
When someone undergoes a medical procedure, patient safety is expected and deserved. Right Scan Right Time supports policies to ensure medical technology is utilized in an environment that enhances and ensures safety for all patients. Patient safety policies that we support include:
Safe Medical Device Repair and Maintenance
Safe Servicing
Like any other device, the medical imaging equipment we rely on to monitor and identify health conditions must be serviced and maintained over time to ensure it functions correctly. But unlike a consumer device like your phone or radio, medical imaging devices like CT and MRI machines are highly sophisticated, and if they are not properly maintained and repaired, the result could be catastrophic—a missed or incorrect diagnosis or injuries
So-called “Right to repair” bills applied to medical technology put patients at risk by allowing third-party service companies – who are not regulated by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) – to access proprietary documentation, parts, and tools used to diagnose, maintain, and repair complex medical devices.
To enhance patient safety and cybersecurity, policymakers should continue to support exempting medical devices from any “right to repair” legislation and oppose any that don’t.
Cybersecurity
Patients today benefit from advanced, connected medical technologies that help doctors diagnose conditions earlier, make more accurate decisions, and deliver better care. But as these devices become more connected, they can also become targets for cyberattacks, putting patient safety, personal health information, and access to timely care at risk.
Protecting patients in this digital environment requires a shared commitment from policymakers, medical device manufacturers, and health care providers. All these entities play a role in ensuring that the technologies patients rely on are safe, secure, and resilient against cyber threats.
Right Scan Right Time supports policies and incentives that prioritize patient protection by strengthening medical device cybersecurity, improving defenses against ransomware attacks, and ensuring devices are built with security in mind from development through their entire lifecycle. These steps are essential to maintaining patient trust and ensuring uninterrupted, high-quality care.
Innovation
We support policies that promote ongoing innovation in medical imaging so patients can benefit from more accurate, timely, and effective tools for diagnosis and care. A strong innovation environment enables development of more precise diagnostics and new life-saving technologies while supporting safe, responsible adoption across the healthcare system.
Protecting Medical Imaging in Rural Communities
Many local hospitals are struggling, which impacts whether they can bring their communities cutting-edge medical imaging technology.
That’s why site-neutral payment policies, which would require Medicare to cut hospital reimbursement rates to extremely low levels, threaten patients’ access to receiving the right scan at the right time, especially in rural communities where the hospital may be the only provider for miles around.
Small community hospitals cannot afford a reimbursement cut for imaging and still invest in those high-quality care services for their communities. The priority should be ensuring patients can get the right care, in the right setting, at the right time—not a one-size-fits-all payment approach that could unintentionally limit options.