CHARLOTTE, N.C.While there has been a great deal of attention placed on the importance of alarm management over the past 35 years, many of the core problems in the provider setting havent improved, based on a 2011 nationwide survey. The results were presented June 3 at the 2012 annual conference of AAMI, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation.

A healthcare system in Albuquerque, N.M., by adapting a home healthcare program, achieved savings of 19 percent over costs for similar inpatients.

Partners HealthCare, the largest provider in Massachusetts, reported second quarter operating income of $5.3 million, compared with $71.2 million in the prior-year period.

Canadian researchers have developed and validated a decision tool to help physicians better discern which patients who visit an emergency department for heart failure (HF) should be hospitalized and which should be discharged. The evidence-based risk score was found to predict with high accuracy patients who were at risk of death within seven days of presentation.

CSC will work with NextGate Solutions to integrate the NextGate Multi-Language Enterprise Master Patient Index with a range of the healthcare software applications provided by iSoft, which CSC acquired in July 2011.

CMIO's online newsletter will bring you a review of the weeks most-read stories each Friday. From another delay of Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) prepayment audits from CMS to a new federal mobile technology mandate from President Barack Obama, this week's news certainly covered the spectrum of health IT.

Sunshine laws appear to have little influence on physician prescribing of branded statins and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. An analysis that compared prescribing patterns in states that enacted disclosure laws with those with no such provisions found little difference in physician behavior. The results were published May 28 in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The most consistent predictors of physicians who use internet-based communication technologies were being male, being younger and having teaching hospital privileges, according to findings published online May 25 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.