A collaboration between McKesson and HP was formed to offer physicians McKessons EHR/practice management systems bundled with HP office hardware.

Health IT leaders, who are looking into joining an health information exchange (HIE) platform, must first build trust, advised to Dana Gibson, vice president of WNC Data Link Services, which includes 16 hospitals in western North Carolina. CMIO spoke with Gibson about how to her organization developed this network.

Whether health information exchange (HIE) efforts start from the ashes of a defunct regional health information organization or some other impetus, all share the goal of actually exchanging healthcare information, and implementers have the foresight (and stubbornness) necessary to overcome a range of obstacles. Arguably, the biggest of these are matters of trust and money.

A fully automatic 3D reconstruction software has compared favorably to 2D x-ray images in the cath lab, while also contributing new clinical information about patients' coronary anatomy, according to a feasibility study reported Jan. 26 online in Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions.

Hartford Healthcare is implementing an health information exchange (HIE) platform that will connect providers in the Hartford, Conn.-based healthcare system and be deployed in a statewide demonstration project beginning next month.CMIO spoke with Steve ONeill, vice president of information services at Hartford Healthcare, about building an HIE using open-source tools.

EHR vendors must incorporate software-as-a-service (SaaS) and speech recognition services into their product portfolio if they wish to take advantage of market opportunities in 2010 EHR market, according to a report by market research firm Ovum.

The progress toward defining meaningful use has been impressive, but the timeline may be too compressed for many, said Steven Stack, MD, member of the board of trustees at the American Medical Association (AMA), last week, during the eHealth Initiative's second Webinar on meaningful use. Also, to digitize 20 percent of the U.S. economy in a three- to five-year period, theres not enough workforce to do that, Stack said.

EHR provider NextGen Healthcare Information Systems has begun its NextGen Certified Health IT Consultant Program, in order to provide NextGen certification training to the health IT consulting community and to regional extension centers on NextGen EHR, NextGen EPM and ancillary modules.