A new hospital breaking ground usually isnt breaking news. But the vision of patient care at one new facility, tentatively named Palomar Medical Center West (PMC West), is currently illegal under California state law.

Healthcare information systems provider DR Systems has released a partial list of the medical facilities in the U.S., which will be participating in its electronic medical information exchange (eMix) business venture trial. 

Boston Scientific has begun to restructure its leadership team and modify the organization--including significant changes to its international headquarters in Natick, Mass.--and initiated layoffs of 8 to 10 percent of its non-direct labor base.

By way of functional MRI (fMRI), researchers from the Imaging Institute at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio were able to observe the default-mode network-0a neural network in the brain--and determine that genetics have an effect on this and several other networks.

The addition of MRI scans to conventional triple assessment techniques for diagnosis of breast cancer has no effect on the reoperation rate, based on the COMICE trial published in the Feb. 13 issue of the Lancet.

Although individual practitioners and healthcare systems are adopting new IT approaches at almost every level of care, National Coordinator for Health IT David Blumenthal, MD, is calling for more innovation. The U.S. health system must take full advantage of the computing technology that has transformed virtually every other aspect of modern life, wrote Blumenthal in a recent commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Quality Systems, a provider of healthcare information systems and connectivity software, has entered into an agreement to acquire Opus Healthcare Solutions.

Using sports film and examining the brain as it handles powerful, rapid-fire positive and negative emotions, researchers at Duke University in Durham, N.C., discovered emotion-induced resonance in brain activity and showed that people remember more positive events than negative events, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience.