The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently released four notices seeking contractors to assist and evaluate the administration of grant programs from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT that promote state health information exhanges and the creation of health IT training centers.

Medical management company AdvancedMD Software has acquired PracticeOne, a privately-held provider of EHR software, for an undisclosed sum.

The Transportation Security Administration is looking to deploy whole-body scanners, which produce anatomically correct body images and can detect objects and substances concealed by clothing, at security checkpoints in U.S. airports. The American College of Radiology (ACR) has confirmed the safety of the scanners the TSA seeks to deploy.

Computer scientists from Kansas State University (KSU) are in the process of developing tools to strengthen the security of information systems, including those that hold patient medical records and other sensitive information.

The National Quality Forum (NQF) recently endorsed 70 measures that combine data from two or more common electronic sources such as administrative claims, pharmacy systems, laboratory systems and registries to advance use of electronic data for quality improvement.

Medicaid programs in Tennessee and Pennsylvania will receive federal matching funds for state planning activities necessary to implement the EHR incentive programs established by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Tennessee will receive approximately $2.7 million in federal matching funds while Pennsylvania will receive $1.4 million.

The provisions of the Health IT for Economical and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act are best understood not as investments in technology per se but as efforts to improve the health of Americans and the performance of their healthcare system, wrote David Blumenthal, MD, the head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, in a perspective published in the Dec. 30, 2009 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

With $19 billion of federal stimulus money in play to modernize healthcare systems, and a mandate for U.S. providers to use electronic medical records by 2013, many hospitals are starting to implement EMRs as a step toward electronic health records.