Boston Scientific Corporation announced today that it has stopped shipment and is retrieving field inventory of all its implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) and cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators (CRT-Ds).

Patient monitoring technology is evolving to deliver far more than digital vital signs. Todays physiological monitoring systems provide immediacy, accuracy and ease of access with an added dimension of both intelligenceto predict, monitor and analyze patient events over timeand flexibility to monitor patients from other areas in the unit and even the patients home.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) has charged Guidant, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Boston Scientific, with covering-up device failure problems associated with its Ventak Prizm 2 DR and Contak Renewal implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICD).

A study conducted by the American Medical Association (AMA) found that within 24 of the 43 reporting states in the study, two large insurance payors had a combined market share of 70 percent or more, and that overall competition in the health insurance industry is decreasing.

At the HIMSS10 conference in Atlanta next week, Acuo Technologies (Booth #2257) will be unveiling AcuoVision, a Web-enabled system and performance monitoring dashboard that offers one click access to enterprise image management status.

Boston Scientific is not closing international headquarters in Paris and Tokyo, as we incorrectly reported last week. It is eliminating its Natick, Mass.-based International headquarters. The corrected article can be read here. We apologize for any confusion.

Despite the presence of heavy hitters such as IBM, 3M and Dell, no single company owns the EMR market, according to a report from Kalorama Information.

Boston Scientific has financial results for the fourth quarter and full year, which ended Dec. 31, 2009, indicating a reduction in net losses for both.