To ensure practitioners' expectationsfor instance, regarding improvements in medication safetyare met, vendors should develop and implement refinements in their software as practices upgrade to newer, certified EHRs, was the finding of a recent clinical study published Aug. 28 online in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

More than $40 million in grants, partly supported by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), has been awarded to state, tribal, local and territorial health departments and several schools of public health by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to enhance public health infrastructure and strengthen the public health workforce.

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's (HIMSS) EHR Association has responded to the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed rules for the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) and the Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System for 2012.

Problems with physiologic alarm monitoring caused or precipitated 35 patient deaths in Pennsylvania healthcare facilities between June 2004 and December 2010. Of these, 31 were traced to human error. The findings were published in the latest Pennsylvania Patient Safety Advisory, a publication produced for that states Patient Safety Authority by the ECRI Institute and the Institute for Safe Medication Practices.

One of the most challenging measures of the success of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) will be in how well it improves more cost-effective healthcare outcomes for diverse groups by the promotion of integrated care across venues, according to a recently published policy brief by the Health, Economic & Family Security Program at Berkeley Laws Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy in Berkeley, Calif.

It is time to affirm that there is a public health duty to use surveillance data in new ways, for the sake of both populations and individuals, according to the authors of a perspective paper published Aug. 24 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

A recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) cited that while the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) considers a variety of factors when allocating its Medicare Integrity Program (MIP), the organization may consider the prior years funding level, the consequence of not funding and the performance goal that the activity is intended to meet based on GAOs review of CMS documents submitted to justify funding of specific MIP activities.

American physicians are again rushing to become employed by hospitals—and hospitals are responding in kind, says D. Louis Glaser, JD, partner with Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP in Chicago, Illinois. "The trend is being driven by the uncertainty of the future," he says. "Physicians and hospitals are wondering how reimbursement is going to change,