BOSTON--Most stakeholders agree that the current U.S. model of healthcare is unsustainable, said keynote speaker Joseph Smith, MD, PhD, chief medical and science officer at West Wireless Health Institute in La Jolla, Calif., during his remarks at the World Congress Second Annual Leadership Summit on mHealth July 29.

The patient-centered medical home model can potentially address many current safety concerns in primary care, wrote Mark Graber, MD, of Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York, and Hardeep Singh, MD, of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, in a commentary published in the July 28 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Roche Diagnostics has received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. FDA for the CoaguChek XS Pro system, a point-of-care anticoagulation monitor with a built-in barcode reader that can capture operator and patient identification information.

Intuit has transformed its healthcare business by combining newly acquired Medfusion with its Quicken Health Group to create a new business unit called Intuit Health. Based in Cary, N.C., the group provides online connected services to healthcare settings.

AirStrip Technologies has received FDA clearance to market the AirStrip remote patient monitoring (RPM) tool, including AirStrip RPM Critical Care and AirStrip RPM Cardiology.

Specialized infection control packages can track, analyze and therefore prevent surgical site infections, saving lives and lowering costs. But reporting remains problematic everyone clamors for transparency, but SSIs are non-reimbursable, which discourages reporting. Can software solve this quandary?

Hosted services have been an IT staple in other industries for a decade or more. Now, like never before, hospital IT departments are turning to web hosting and portal-based approaches to access, store, maintain and exchange a widening range of electronic data. With 35 trillion gigabytes (GB) of digital information expected to be created and replicated by 2020, according to a recent report by IDC, moving to a hosted system might become a necessity for healthcare organizations that dont want to be in the data storage business.

This months cover story highlights efforts at several facilities to integrate evidence-based medicine in clinical decision support systems. The value of doing so is becoming increasingly clearimplementation issues, costs and time notwithstanding. Decision support is one of the cornerstones of the recently announced final rule for meaningful use and healthcare in America is now solidly on a path toward a time when data is just as important (and only as good) as the infrastructures that gather, filter and report them.