In some ways, quality measures as they exist are process measures, said John D. Halamka, MD, during his closing keynote HIMSS Virtual Conference presentation.

The arrival of authorized testing organizations and certified EHR products and modules help to answer the question of what is certified, and by whom. However, these arrivals bring other questions into sharper relief: Where does this leave sites that have already implemented an EHR? Are they better off waiting to see if their version of a vendors product gets certified, or scrapping it now for a guaranteed certified product?

No one ever said it was going to be easy, but most physicians who are in the middle of an EMR or EHR implementationor have deployed one and lived to tell the talewould argue that electronic records will make them better clinicians. It just might take a while and involve workflow disruption and financial impacts.

Much of the current focus on the implementation of electronic health records is really a focus on the universal implementation of a longitudinal health recorda comprehensive clinical summary of a patient-based clinical experience, as opposed to the encounter-based, or provider-based records of the past.

Carestream Health has received an approval letter from the FDA for its computed radiography (CR) system for mammography.

Royal Philips Electronics has installed its Ambient Experience offering in a pediatric x-ray setting at Nemours Childrens Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla.

 The National Cancer Institute has stopped the multi-million dollar National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) as initial results showed a 20 percent reduction in lung cancer death associated with CT screening compared with x-ray screening.

Aurora Health Care, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit healthcare system serving eastern Wisconsin, is engaged in a three-year process to qualify its 15 hospitals, 1,200 eligible providers and 120 physical locations for Stage 1 meaningful use of EHRs. According to Judith A. Murphy, RN, vice president of IT at Aurora, this effort has been roughly 75 percent clinical and 25 percent IT.