As the deadline to meet meaningful use criteria looms and physicians work to adopt the proper health IT, the American Medical Association (AMA) and 91 other medical societies submitted formal comments to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to advocate changes to the proposed e-prescribing program and eRx penalty program.

Women with mammographically dense breasts not only face a higher risk of breast cancer, but their tumors also are more likely to have more aggressive characteristics than women with less dense breasts, according to a study published online July 27 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

A medical physics consult in the August issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology (JACR) outlined the balancing act between dose reduction and image noise in head CT studies, and explained that lower fixed-tube current or automatic exposure control techniques can slash dose for both adult and pediatric head CT, with some studies regularly achieving the sub-mSv threshold.

EHRs built with the cloud computing model can achieve acceptable privacy and security through business associate contracts with cloud providers that specify compliance requirements, performance metrics and liability sharing, according to a perspective published online July 4 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

drchrono, a company offering an EHR platform for the iPad, has received certification for its iPad EHR app.

Health 2.0, in conjunction with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), has launched a new innovation competition sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) titled, "Using Public Data for Cancer Prevention and Control: From Innovation to Impact."

Shimadzu Medical Systems' Radspeed maintained the top ranking for the second year among digital x-ray developers, according to a recent KLAS report, "Digital X-ray 2011: An Untethered Market," but the company was not alone in garnering strong scores. Fujifilm Medical Systems took second place by a slim margin, the survey found, and other vendors, including Canon Medical Systems, Carestream Health and Viztek, received overall performance scores of more than 90 percent.

An early trial of a CAD program improved all 12 participating radiologists detection of lung nodules on x-ray, while averaging 2.6 false-positives per image, offering potentially promising results for the temporal subtraction method for CAD, according to a study published in the August issue of Academic Radiology.