Imprivata announced a host of new products and industry partnerships at HIMSS11 in Orlando, Fla., Feb. 21-24. Designed to accelerate the adoption of EMR applications and help healthcare providers achieve meaningful use, the new products and partnerships focus on three key areas: virtualization, mobility and clinician workflow.

They say good things come in small packages. In the case of handheld ultrasound, which seems to be shrinking annually, the small package could diffuse ultrasound across the enterprise and across the globe.

In the past 50 years, ultrasound devices have shrunk as dramatically as their applications have swelled: point-of-care ultrasound is now a safe and effective modality for procedure guidance, diagnosis and screening, but the technique is a user-dependent technology demanding competence, argued the authors of a report published Feb. 24 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

ORLANDO, Fla.At HIMSS 2010, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) launched the Direct Project with a Powerpoint presentation and a concept: to enable every provider in the country to have access to universal addressing and transport capabilities that will let them push information to other providers, regardless of network, health information exchange or EHR, says Arien Malec, coordinator of the Direct Project and coordinator of the Standards and Interoperability Framework at ONC.

GE Healthcare highlighted its portfolio of health IT software and systems geared to help providers achieve meaningful use (MU), while elucidating the challenges that radiologists face in meeting MU criteria during HIMSS11 in Orlando, Fla., Feb. 20 to Feb. 24. The company shared that GE Centricity Enterprise version 6.9 was certified as a Complete EHR and highlighted Centricity Practice Solution 10, Centricity Patient Online and eHealth Community Desktop.

ORLANDO, Fla.--Take it from a Davies Award winner: EMR adoption is just the beginning. The next step is to leverage the incoming flood of data in as many ways as possible to derive maximum value from it, said Bert Reese, senior vice president and CIO of Sentara Healthcare in Norfolk, Va., and David Levin, MD, Sentaras CMIO and vice president of medical informatics.

ORLANDO, Fla.--Attendees were treated to a sneak peek at the meaningful use attestation process Feb. 22 during a session the 2011 HIMSS annual conference. Elizabeth S. Holland, director, HIT Initiatives Group, provided an overview of the process, beginning with a refresher of the eligible provider online registration process and a reminder to use www.cms.gov as a meaningful use resource.  

ORLANDO, Fla.-- EHRs can make it possible to impact population health for diabetic patients and provide patient specific counseling for this condition, according to K.C. Arnold, ANP, an adult and acute care nurse practitioner at The Diabetes Center, who made the Feb. 22 presentation on the topic at the 2011 annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference.