Bill Crounse, MD, has been a physician, a broadcaster, the cofounder of a tech startup and is currently the senior director of Microsofts healthcare division. He will be speaking this weekend at the annual Harvard Business School Healthcare Conference, but he stopped by CMIO first to give a preview of his keynote speech.

On Dec. 5, 2011, Metro Community Provider Network in Englewood, Colo., became aware that a hacker potentially accessed the personal health information of approximately 2,000 patients.

Commercial electronic prescribing systems (e-prescribing) could substantially reduce prescribing error rates in hospital inpatients, according to a study published in this week's PLoS Medicine.

The healthcare industry as a whole has been slow to adopt social media tools and to join online social networks, but the presenters of a HealthWorks Collective webinar said hospitals that arent utilizing the modern mode of communication are making a mistake and encouraged them to start now.

In the last decade, private office musculoskeletal (MSK) ultrasound swelled 717 percent, from 19,372 exams in 2000 to 158,351 in 2009, with podiatrists accounting for more than half of the growth, according to a study published in the February issue of Journal of the American College of Radiology. The findings led researchers to raise concerns about self-referral.

Lexington Clinic, a multispecialty group in Lexington, Ky., is notifying 1,018 patients of a privacy data breach, as a laptop was stolen from the groups neurology department on Dec. 7, 2011.

CT angiography (CTA) protocol developments designed to speed imaging and optimize arterial opacification may have an unintentional side effect and overestimate acute ischemic infarct size, according to a study published in the February edition of Radiology. The discrepancies could have inappropriately excluded up to 90 percent of eligible stroke patients from reperfusion therapy if they had been used to inform treatment decision making.

The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) announced that Rick Schooler will be the recipient of the 2011 John E. Gall Jr. CIO of the Year award and that he will be presented with the award at the annual HIMSS conference on Feb. 23 in Las Vegas.