Highlights of the important and interesting in the world of healthcare:

Warning: Smoking can kill you. The Food and Drug Administration plans to whittle 36 graphic smoking warnings to nine and will seek the public’s input on the proposal of putting them on the front and back of every cigarette packet starting in October of 2012, according to U.S. News and World Report.

Merge Healthcare growing again. A last-minute investment saved Chicago health system Merge Healthcare Inc. from bankruptcy two years ago, and a string of acquisitions subsequently transformed the company. Now Merge plans to focus on sales, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Defending FDA from budget ax. FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg is trying to forestall any talk of cutting her agency’s funding as Republicans head to the House with their budget axes sharpened, according to FiercePharma.

HIV joint venture could go IPO. ViiV Healthcare, an HIV company set up a year ago by GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Pfizer Inc. could be spun off and floated in an initial public offering once its drug pipeline has matured a little further, Reuters reports.

Data breaches cost hospitals. The cost of a data breach is about $1 million per hospital per year, and the lifetime value of a lost patient is $108,000, according to a study by the non-profit Ponemon Institute, FierceHealthcare reports. Overall, data leaks cost U.S. hospitals $6 billion a year.

Drug pipelines show little innovation. Not one previously unidentified drug target was reported at the meeting of the American Chemical Society meeting in August. A recent association gathering yielded presentations for 58 new drug candidates but, by one reckoning, the amount of innovation on display was lacking, according to the Pharmalot blog.

Merge plans to price the offering, aimed at “select institutional investors,” at $3 per share, according to a statement from the company.  Not coincidentally, the company’s share price fell to $3.01 midday Friday before rebounding a bit to close at $3.12. Its previous-day closing price was $3.60.

Merge expects proceeds of the sale to net about $25 million, more than two-thirds of which would be used to pay down debt, according to a regulatory filing.  The rest of the proceeds would go toward “general corporate purposes,” including working capital, the filing said.

The company made news earlier this month when two former executives settled accounting fraud charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company’s former chief executive and chief financial officer agreed to pay about $900,000 combined without admitting to any allegations of wrongdoing.

On the year, the company’s stock has more than doubled after opening at $1.28 on January 2. In August, Merge acquired an imaging company for $22 million after a June acquisition of a clinical trials software firm for an undisclosed sum.

Merge will pay an estimated $22 million in its common stock. The transaction is expected to be completed in September.

Merge believes it can expand the adoption of Confirma’s computer assisted detection technology, which currently focuses on breast, liver and prostate imaging. Initially, Merge will incorporate Confirma’s breast imaging technology with its own, but expand the use of computer assisted detection into clinical trials and expand its use “to bring additional efficiency to established markets where imaging costs are under fire,” Justin Dearborn, Merge’s chief executive officer, stated in a release.

In June, Merge announced its plans to acquire the North Carolina clinical trials software company etrials Worldwide, which it completed in mid-July. Less than two weeks ago Merge reported second-quarter results in which it eked out a net income of $400,000 — an improvement over the $18.2 million loss over the same period last year. The company called its operating income of $4.1 million the best results in three years.