The smallest state in the U.S. is making big health IT moves. At its Dec. 8 Health IT Expo, the Rhode Island Quality Institute (RIQI) demonstrated a new data locator feature available on the statewide health information exchange (HIE), which RIQI operates.

In response to a request made by the National Quality Forum (NQF), RAND attempted to determine how performance measures are being used in the healthcare industry, what factors influence their use, how institutions have changed as a result of their use and how their use could be improved.

Writing on the Office of the National Coordinator for Health ITs (ONC) blog, Health IT Buzz, ONC Office of Standards and Interoperability Director Doug Fridsma, MD, stated that vendors should have little choice in deciding whether their products will adhere to national standards.

Market researcher KLAS spoke with 97 providers to develop a general sense of healthcare professionals perceptions of cloud computing and found that those utilizing other technologies were skeptical of web-based data storage even though 58 percent said that they were considering cloud systems.

Presenting at the Rhode Island Regional Extension Centers (RIQI) Dec. 8 health IT exposition, a group of three physicians from solo-provider practices and two of their employees spoke to a group of similarly situated physicians about their experiences implementing EHR systems.

IHE-Europe, a nonprofit association dedicated to interoperability in health IT, has launched IHE-Services, a health IT connectivity and interoperability testing service that the Belgium-based organization believes will benefit large-scale health IT initiatives and efforts to design new health IT products.

Prescriptions handwritten by 78 providers offices over the course of approximately one year contained more than two errors per prescription written, an error rate that researchers believe could be significantly lowered through the use of e-prescribing systems, which automatically resolve instances of illegibility; a rate that could be further improved through the use of systems with clinical decision support (CDS).

Chilmark Research predicts that radiology departments will turn to cloud-based computing tools as physical media is an ineffective, costly and slow way to store and transport images. The market research firms findings were presented in a November report sponsored by lifeIMAGE, a health IT services provider.