BOSTONBetter monitoring is needed to understand how EMRs and health information exchange (HIE) impact the patients experience of care and best practices need to be shared to improve these technologies, Barbra G. Rabson, executive director at Massachusetts Health Quality Partners reported Thursday at the Health IT: Creating Jobs, Reducing Costs and Improving Quality national conference, hosted by Massachusetts Gov. Deval L. Patrick.

Its been an eventful week for CONNECT, the open source software project that aims to enable secure exchange of health information for the Nationwide Health Information Network initiative.

CT utilization as a percentage of cross-sectional imaging studies has decreased steadily since 2003 in pediatric facilities across North America, concluded a recent article published in the May issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology.

Merge Healthcare successfully closed the merger agreement with Amicas Wednesday, creating a medical imaging software and health IT technologies provider.

Vish Sankaran, program director of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health ITs Federal Health Architecture,  is leaving the program within the next several weeks to seek other opportunities.

RadNet, a provider of fixed-site outpatient diagnostic imaging services through a network of 185 outpatient imaging centers, has acquired three multi-modality facilities from the Sonix Medical Resources bankruptcy proceeding in New York.

Capsule Technologies and GE Healthcare have formed a partnership, in which Capsule will integrate its medical device connectivity system with GE's Centricity Enterprise, Perinatal and Perioperative suites.

The Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland has placed the first order for Sectras SyMRI Suite software.