The FDA has granted Proteus Biomedical 501(k) clearance for its Raisin Personal Monitor, a wireless personal health device.

IDC Health Insights predicts the HIE landscape will shift dramatically during the next two years, and enterprise HIEs serving integrated delivery networks and health or hospital systems stand to benefit for several reasons. Topping the list: Enterprise HIEs can more easily establish a sustainable business model, and are not as crippled by organizational issues and difficulties with data governance as their statewide and regional counterparts.

Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE)-Europe, an organization that seeks to accelerate the adoption of EHRs by improving the exchange of information among healthcare systems, has re-elected Peter Kuenecke as vendor co-chair for an additional two-year term.

Health IT company EDIMS has signed a multi-year agreement to license medical software company Callibra's Discharge 1-2-3 application to automate the emergency department (ED) discharge process, including providing patient instructions and prescriptions.

Telehealth may not be a cure-all for what ails U.S. healthcare, but this is an area where health IT is already answering the call for increased access and lower-cost care delivery, powered by federal money and technology initiatives, and by improvements in wireless networks, data compression and remote patient monitoring.

Bottlenecks in the emergency department (ED) can send physicians scrambling to prevent chaos while striving to provide optimal patient care. Automated patient tracking, thin-client dashboards, pre-hospital cardiac triage systems and emergency department information systems are helping ED physicians do more of the former while preventing the latter.

Patients must be clearly identified in all stages of care. The identity stakes have never been higher: The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies has reported that medication errors including administering the wrong medicine to the wrong patient harm at least 1.5 million people each year and the extra medical costs of treating drug-related injuries occurring in hospitals alone amount to $3.5 billion a year. This figure doesn't include lost wages, productivity or additional healthcare costs.

Like the old adage goes: no pain, no gain. CPOE is one of those areas where the pain of implementation and physician training is certainly worth the gain of better patient care.