athenahealth, a developer of web-based practice management, EHR and patient communication services to medical groups, has posted financial and operational gains for the second quarter of fiscal year 2010, which ended June 30.

3M has reported that its second quarter net income was $1.121 billion versus $783 million in the second quarter of 2009, with a strong showing across all its business segments, including healthcare.

St. Jude Medical has reported double-digit increase of sales and net earnings for the second quarter, which ended July 3.

Service providers must embrace cloud services and bundle them into their technologies for small and midsize enterprises as well as large ones, according to a report from Analysys Mason. The researchers found that the global market for enterprise cloud-based services will grow from $12.1 billion in 2010 to $35.6 billion in 2015.

Emdat has introduced a new iPhone application to assist healthcare professionals in managing their patient notes.

MRI software company Acuitas Medical has garnered a 700,000 ($899,700 U.S.) co-investment from Finance Wales and Altima Global Special Opportunities Master Fund towards the development of its MR-based Fine Texture Analysis technology, and has named Sir Michael Brady as non-executive director of the board.

Ingenix, a health IT and services company that is also a wholly owned subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire Picis, a provider of health IT for hospital emergency, surgery and intensive-care departments and hospital financial information systems, for an undisclosed sum.

Hitting my inbox this week were some EHR vendors' announcements that their products or parts of them have been upgraded with meaningful use requirements in mind. Its not always easy figure out how much in these products is actually new. What is clear is that meaningful use has been out of the gate for 10 days now, and here comes a wave of meaningful-use-ready offerings.