Florida physicians who care for Medicaid participants said they are more likely to apply for incentive payments to adopt EHRs under the Health IT for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009, according to research published in the August issue of Health Affairs.

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.

Clerity Solutions, a provider of migration, modernization and optimization tools, has unveiled a health IT services wing, Clerity Healthcare, to provide turnkey hardware and software tools for the healthcare market.

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.

The success of health reform efforts will depend, in part, on creating new and better ways to organize, deliver and pay for healthcare, wrote Francis J. Crosson, MD, senior fellow at the Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Policy in Oakland, Calif., in an analysis and commentary piece published in the July edition of Health Affairs.

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.