The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has employed Lockheed Martin for two contracts to advance EHRs and secure health information exchanges to support the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN), for a total of $9 million over two years.

MinXray has released its CMDR-2S portable direct radiography (DR) system, which is comprised of MinXray's HF120/60HPPWV PowerPlus portable x-ray unit, a Varian PaxScan 4336R imaging panel and the Dell Latitude laptop computer.

Recent conversations with several health IT pros have made clearer the EHR connection to HIEs. As one of the features in this Portal indicates, an EHR can expand clinical information exchange throughout an organization, and can bridge gaps in the exchange process, thus paving the way for HIE connections.

The Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center in Indianapolis will partner with the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE) to exchange EHR information using the Nationwide Health Information Network.

More hospitals and integrated delivery systems are relying on CMIOs in efforts to bridge the gap between clinicians and IT staff, states a guidebook published by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), intended to support healthcare CIOs in the implementation of EHRs to meet the meaningful use requirements issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, of Monterey, Calif., has selected RelayHealth's health information exchange (HIE) connectivity tool.

CareSpark, a regional HIE in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia, became operational in 2008 and never looked back. The HIE has grown to encompass 1.3 million patients in its master patient index (MPI) with more than one million clinical documents being exchanged daily and 35 participating organizations. Also, the HIE plans to expand into the Knoxville, Tenn., region, says Pat Pope, provider relations coordinator for CareSpark, who recently spoke with CMIO.

Federal and state initiatives have come and gone, but for John Muir Health, the goal has remained the same: a patient-centric kind of information exchange, says Kathryn Bennett, MD, MBA, CMIO of the integrated delivery network based in Walnut Creek, Calif., located in the San Francisco Bay Area.