It's been almost three years since President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), a $728 million stimulus package that set aside a relatively modest $20 million for electronic medical records (EMRs). The initial spark has smoldered since those heady days, and presenters at the 2011 meeting of the American College

Placing a spotlight a widespread and well-known problem, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) said it is continuing efforts to reduce problems associated with clinical alarms. The group's latest initiative is the development of new standards and guidance documents, as well as continuing conversations with stakeholders in the medical community.

Abbott will separate into two different publicly traded companies: the medical product manufacturer will split into a diversified medical products company and the other company will be focused on research-based pharmaceuticals.

Hospitals awarded five stars by HealthGrades in 2011 provided better care than their lower-scoring counterparts. According to a HealthGrades report released Oct. 18, patients had a 73 percent lower risk of dying in a five-star hospital than in a one-star hospital.

As the conditions of participation in Medicare and Medicaid have not changed since 1986, the time has come for a full review. That's according to softly stated yet hard-hitting commentary published online Oct. 18 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Two decades ago, hospitals preventive maintenance (PM) strategies focused on upholding the electrical integrity of medical devices. In the years since, clinical engineering departments have been tailoring more advanced PM strategies. In the most forward-looking hospitals and healthcare systems, risk-based methods include careful evaluation of equipment inventories to decide if, when and how often to intervene throughout the lifecycle of many thousands of devices.

Healthcare services and medical devices attracted the largest share of "angel" investments in the first and second quarters of 2011, garnering 25 percent of all such investments, according to a report by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire.

HP and Lucile Packard Childrens Hospital at Stanford, Cali., have developed a patient status system that prompted a treatment change in one-third of patients during a single-center study.