The Richmond VA Medical Center is partnering with MedVirginia on a Department of Veterans Affairs pilot project to improve delivery of veterans' health information. 

The Patient Advocate Foundation (PAF), a national non-profit organization that seeks to safeguard patients through mediation, reported a 30 percent increase in requests for assistance from Medicare beneficiaries in 2010 compared with 2009.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will invest as much as $1 billion in a national collaboration that aims to save 60,000 lives during the next three years by eliminating preventable injuries and complications in patient care, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced at a press conference today.

The National Hispanic Medical Association (NHMA) is partnering with e-prescribing software provider DrFirst to offer e-prescribing, meaningful use and patient medication adherence programs to NHMA members.

Seventy percent of adults think the U.S. healthcare system needs to be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt. A large majority also want their care to include health IT such as EMRs and data exchange, according to a Commonwealth Fund survey.

Although the percentage of state population with healthcare coverage will increase, the percentage of employees offered insurance will not change substantially, but a small number of employees in small firms (under 100 employees in 2016) will obtain employers-sponsored insurance through state insurance exchanges, according to research from Rand Health.

Twenty percent of community hospitals plan to switch their EMR system during the next couple of years, according to a report from KLAS.

NEW ORLEANSThe cardiology profession seems to suffer from a collective case of magical thinking, offered Charles McKay, MD, of the University of California - Los Angeles. Symptoms include a sense that quality measurement is not real, an insistence that decision support is unnecessary and a belief that hospitals dont care about quality. Researchers shared data from five outcome studies that addressed these sacred cows, during a presentation at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology. (The final two studies are profiled below. Read CVB Daily on April 7 for the first three.)