The European Union has spawned 27 e-health projects this year, following a call under the EU Framework Programme 7.

VPDiagnostics has signed a co-marketing agreement with Philips Healthcare to provide its FDA-cleared carotid artery atherosclerosis analysis package, called MRI-PlaqueView, for Philips MRI customers.

Emdeon, a healthcare revenue and payment cycle management company, has acquired Chapin Revenue Cycle Management, a Tampa, Fla.-based provider of hospital-based revenue cycle services, including accounts receivable management, medical denials, appeals and collection improvement initiatives.

Without thoughtful intervention and sound guidance from government and medical organizations, EHR technology may encumber rather than support clinicians and hinder rather than promote health outcome improvements, based on research from Cleveland-based Case Western Reserve University.

Our 2010 CMIO Top Trends Survey says: Federal initiatives are driving health IT spending and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. HITECH might succeedor not. Economic uncertainty has many facilities strugglingbut a majority of organizations are increasing their budgets, adopting new technologies, and hiring and training staff.

Improvements in slide scanning, image management and analysis technologies, and are pushing digital pathology systems forward. At the same time, the demand for faster, more accurate diagnoses is increasing. The result? Market researcher Frost & Sullivan has estimated that digital pathology hardware and software systems could become a $2 billion industry during the next decade.

IT-enabled medication management strategies tap computerized provider order entry (CPOE), bar-coded electronic medication administration records and clinical decision support modules in electronic health records to reduce medication errors. They have their work cut out for them: The Institute of Medicine estimates that 1.5 million preventable medication errors occur in the U.S. every year, costing some $8 billion.

By assigning one password for all applications, single sign on (SSO) technology gives clinicians speedy access to the apps they need. Armed with SSO, users neednt write down (then lose) passwords. So whats the catch? These techniques wont streamline access if all necessary apps arent included under the SSO umbrella, and health IT leaders must make sure their organizations password protection and security policies can accommodate an SSO framework.