The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovations awarded Mayo Clinic, Philips and the United States Critical Illness and Injury Trials Group more than $16 million to investigate how cloud-based technology can improve care delivered to Medicare beneficiaries in intensive care units.

The imbalance in Medicare is going to continue to grow, said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) at the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT’s annual meeting on Dec. 14, referring to the discrepancy between what individuals pay in to the system compared with the value of the services they receive. “The question is going to be whether we have the personal and political will to take this enormously powerful tool of health IT and allow it to be transformative.”

While mobile devices have the potential to allow providers access to valuable tools wherever they go, organizations are still determining best practices for securing mobile devices, according to a Dec. 13 presentation at the Privacy & Security Forum hosted by the Health Information and Management Systems Society and Healthcare IT News.

Prior to participating in the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT's (ONC) annual meeting, John D. Halamka, MD, MS, health IT guru and CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, blogged that interoperability will dramatically increase by 2014.

Healthcare consumers considering a physician at University of Utah Health Care now have online access to the system’s patient satisfaction scores and comments. The rankings are based on more than 40,000 patient surveys and evaluate physicians on nine questions.

This month brings, of course, a wealth of reports from the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) annual convention. Journal studies also noted several developments on the advanced visualization front. 

Meeting Meaningful Use requirements and a desire to improve patient experiences drove practice transformation and standardization at the Emory Clinic, said its CMO and Chief Quality Officer Penny Z. Castellano, MD, during a Dec. 11 webinar hosted by the Institute for Health Technology Transformation.

AFrame Digital has received FDA 510(k) clearance to market its flagship MobileCare Monitor system as a Class II device. Since 2009, MobileCare Monitor has been cleared as a Class I device.