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.

Quality Systems, an Irvine, Calif.-based developer of healthcare information systems and connectivity technologies, has entered into an agreement to acquire ViaTrack Systems, a developer of IT for electronic data interchange (EDI) offerings.

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.

Black Book Rankings has released its annual rankings of the EHR vendors for inpatient settings. A division of the Brown-Wilson Group, a market research firm, Black Book Rankings surveyed 12,075 healthcare system stakeholders familiar with EMRs and graded their rankings of 422 EHR vendors against 18 separate performance areas.

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).