CHS Health Services (CHS), a workforce health management company, has created a strategic partnership with Boston-based Center for Connected Health, a division of Partners HealthCare. The two will jointly market their services to deliver specialty care from Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston using IT to help patients access specialty healthcare providers in the Partners network.

Many EHRs automated functions do not account for the unique characteristics of pediatric providers, necessitating a redesign of EHR user interfaces to allow for accommodation, according to a June National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report.

The National Center for Health Statistics released encouraging numbers for physician adoption of EHR systems and Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, the national coordinator for health IT, was quick to comment on the high satisfaction rate and "tangible benefits" available today for patients, in his post on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' HealthITBuzz blog.

The ambulatory EHR market is still growing. As larger healthcare organizations look to replace their current systems and smaller organizations continue boarding the EHR train with their first systems, vendors are juggling resources to meet a diverse set of provider needs, according to a recently published KLAS report.

Interoperability efforts continue to expand, according to the news from the past month. Recommendations for reporting lab results using Direct Project standards were released and a study found that inviting patients to use an interactive personal health record linked to their clinicians EHR increased their likelihood of receiving preventive care, among other achievements.

To assist critical access hospitals using unlicensed scribes, the Joint Commission published a list of frequently asked questions regarding relevant standards.

With so many available, it can be difficult sorting through libraries of mobile applications (apps) to find those that are useable, useful and appropriate for healthcare settings. To assist healthcare IT departments with mobile app selection and assessment, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society released a guide to evaluating app performance.

Johns Hopkins University has established a new center aimed at improving and expanding the use of EHR systems, e-health and IT. The Johns Hopkins Center for Population Health IT (CPHIT, pronounced "see-fit") will seek to meld faculty expertise in public health, medicine, informatics, computer science, business and systems engineering to focus on helping public health agencies and private healthcare organizations use e-health tools to increase the efficiency and equity of healthcare delivery, according to a release.