It's almost 2011. Do you know where your EHRs are? The EHR news was voluminous this week. It began with the debut of a new EHR safety reporting system. The iHealth Alliance, a nonprofit group of medical society and professional liability carrier executives, collaborating with federal agencies and PDR Network, has launched EHRevent.org, which establishes a nationwide system for healthcare providers to report issues related to the implementation and use of EHRs using a standardized online format.

Covisint, a Compuware company, has accelerated provider payments for physician offices and large health systems from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for the 2009 Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI).

Telemonitoring of heart failure patients did not improve outcomes and researchers say the results indicate the importance of a thorough, independent evaluation of disease-management strategies before their adoption, according to the Tele-HF study reported at the American Heart Association (AHA) conference in Chicago this week, and simultaneously published online Nov. 16 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Agency for Health Research and Qualitys 2010 Preliminary Comparative Results: Medical Office Survey on Patient Safety Culture shows that 50 percent or more of practices have encountered problems when exchanging accurate, complete and timely information with other entities during the past year.

Intensive surveillance of women with a genetic predisposition for breast cancer that includes MRI can detect breast cancer at an early stage, while women carrying the BRCA1 mutation have poorer screening results and may require tailored screening, prevention and treatment protocols, according to a Dutch study published online Nov. 15 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Integration and interoperability developments of all stripes have come to the fore recently, so lets take a look at some of the news in connectivity during the past month.

CareGroup Healthcare System, a Boston-based integrated healthcare delivery network that includes Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and three other area hospitals, decided to replace its legacy data integration engine platform with the InterSystems Ensemble application integration and development platform.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions has announced the company is entering the healthcare market with identity management and data analytics products to help healthcare payors ensure appropriate access to personal health information and mitigate fraud.