Floridas Agency for Health Care Administration has selected Harris Healthcare Solutions to implement a statewide health information exchange (HIE) infrastructure that will improve delivery and coordination of healthcare.

Two of the major HIE news stories of the year were acquisitions. In August, UnitedHealth Groups Ingenix Division bought Axolotl. Then, earlier this month, Aetna announced its acquisition of Medicity. Since these occurences, there has been a fair amount of punditry about what this might mean for the future of HIEs as we know them.

Health information exchange must occur within a system first. North York General Hospital, a multi-site regional teaching hospital serving north-central Toronto and southern York, Ontario, recently attained Stage 5 of the HIMSS EMR Adoption Model, thanks in large part to its three-year effort to integrate evidence-based order sets into its CPOE system.

From its inception nearly 20 years ago as a Community Health Information Network on the claims and remittance side of healthcare, the Utah Health Information Network has emerged to become the states designated health information exchange (HIE). Now, UHIN is about to launch a pilot program to connect health care providers in the Moab, Utah region with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Culture change is the biggest challenge for U.S. healthcare providers to achieving meaningful use, according to a survey of CMIOs who attended the recent CMIO Summit: The Key to Successful Meaningful Use in Atlanta. The summit was hosted by CMIO magazine, AMDIS and CMIO Advisors

The introduction of EMRs in hospitals and clinics appears to have varying effects on different types of primary care physicians, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

Healthcare network Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, Calif., has connected 250 providers to its health information exchange (HIE) five months after beginning rollout of Medicity's Novo Grid technology.

Integrating health IT, data registries and public health interventions can lead to better care, decrease the number of deaths per year from preventable healthcare-related infections and conditions and help patients gain better control or their comorbidities such as hypertension, said Thomas R. Frieden, MD, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, during a webinar Dec. 15 sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT.