The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has issued an interim final rule with a request for comment to remove the EHR implementation specifications related to public health surveillance.

An electronic nearly hard-stop alert in an inpatient computerized physician order entry (CPOE) system seems extremely effective in changing prescribing. However, this intervention precipitated clinically important treatment delays in four patients who needed immediate drug therapy, according to an article published Sept. 27 in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The results of a five-year, $5 million Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) State and Regional Demonstration in Health IT are in: all six award recipients developed data sharing at the regional or state level.

Although many patients want to email their physicians, physician adoption and use of email with patients remains uncommononly 6.7 percent of office-based physicians routinely emailed patients in 2008, according to a study by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC), based in Washington D.C.

The nonprofit Health Information Partnership for Tennessee has selected Axolotls Elysium Exchange to build the states health inforamtion exchange (HIE) infrastructure.

Health information exchange service company Medicity has secured contractual commitments for 12 hospitals across five health systems in the southeastern U.S., Pennsylvania and Oregon.

Healthcare consulting practices Alschuler Associates and Semantically Yours will merge to form the Lantana Consulting Group for consulting and development services. The new Cambridge, Mass.-based company will take effect Jan. 1, 2011.

A recent survey of more than 500 physicians by Physicians Reciprocal Insurers revealed that 85 percent were aware of the financial incentives for implementing EMR systems, but more than 35 percent did not know that they face government-assessed financial penalties for not complying.