The saying hope for the best and plan for the worst is more than good advice. When hospital servers crash or vital equipment and patient data are underwater, a well-thought-out disaster recovery plan with redundant archiving is crucial to weathering the crisis and getting systems back up and running as quickly as possible. Now a HIPAA requirement, disaster recovery planning enables hospitals to determine their risks and plan for the worst.

Compared with other industries, cloud-based clinical application development has been rather slow. However, as algorithms and computing power ramp up, healthcare providers are finding more choices and expanding capabilities among cloud apps.

Did you know that 10 of the new legislators headed to Capitol Hill next month hail from healthcare backgrounds? And they all ran on the anti-healthcare-reform platform? Even some of the returning senators and representatives who dont want an outright repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act want to trim the bad parts of it. Whats to keep HITECH and other IT-related efforts out of the 112th Congress line of fire?

At the University of Michigan, with allergist Mark Morris, MD, we converted regular clinics for severe asthmatics into a disease management program. Caring for patients went from frustration with the amount of time it took to do all of the processespatients waiting in the lobby for long periods of time, then being routed all over the hospital to get lab work to creating a much more compact, home-like setting that allowed us a lot more time to talk with the patient.

Endosonography performed better than traditional surgical staging in detecting nodal metastases in patients with lung cancer, while combining both procedures improved sensitivity to 94 percent and cut unnecessary thoracotomies by half, according to a study published Nov. 24 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Boston Scientific is set to make headway in the aortic valve market by entering into a definitive agreement to purchase Sadra Medical for $225 million.

Hospitals nationwide are scrambling to handle what is literally a growing image problem higher-quality, volume-rich imaging studies are pushing storage needs to the terabyte realm and beyond. Accessing these images from longer-term storage and across systems also is a growing challenge.

Server-side processing permits 3D image manipulation to take place on a central server before being transmitted to a thin client. This is one innovation that will help facilities meet meaningful use criteria regarding the integration of advanced visualization imaging into the EMR. But there are still some technical challenges ahead.