SAN ANTONIOThe future of healthcare may include mobile emergency hospitals with CTs, operating rooms and clinical labs that can communicate with globally available EMRs, predicted James P. Keller, Jr., vice president health technology evaluation and safety at the ECRI Institute. After initial treatment, he said, providers may one day access real-time data from the patients home bedside using telemedicine.

Google is dicontinuing its Google Health personal health record (PHR) service effective Jan. 1, 2012. Data will remain available for download through Jan. 1, 2013, said Aaron Brown, senior product manager of Google Health, in a blog posted June 24.

As we conducted our second annual CMIO Health IT Top Trends Survey, we welcomed a second round of findings to layer onto last years inaugural results.

BOSTON Health leaders from across the U.S. gathered together at the CMIO Summit Clinical IT Leadership Forum on June 10 to hear and converse with colleagues who have navigated the straits of meaningful use, wrestled health information exchange (HIE) and clinical information systemsand lived to tell the tale of success.

Advanced clinical decision support (CDS) systems prioritize drug interactions, reducing both patient complications and physician time at the computer. And once providers get past the myriad alerts, theyre finding new frontiers for CDS.

Positive change hinges on managing data and managing relationships with stakeholders. It is no coincidence that those two key qualities are essentially a job description for a CMIO.

Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have developed iTrem, an app that lets those with Parkinson's disease and other neurological conditions use their iPhone to collect data on hand and arm tremors and relay the results to clinicians.

Readily available images, whether included in an EHR or a residing in repository, can improve care by reducing unnecessary tests, and lowering patients radiation exposure. Theres also a business case for image exchange, especially among HIEs trying to differentiate their services from competitors. In New York, Rochester RHIO was among the first HIEs in the U.S. to offer image exchange, but now its neighbor, the HealtheConnections RHIO, has joined the image exchange club.