Providers and facilities will be sorting out the HHS/ONCs proposed rules for meaningful use and the Interim Final Rule for some time to come. Reading and digesting the 700-plus pages in these two documents is not for the faint of heart, and the drafts have spawned myriad questions since their release in late December.

In early 1992, the first edition of the book, The Physician-Computer Connection: A Practical Guide to Physician Involvement in Hospital Information Systems was published, and a few months later, the first Physician-Computer Connection Symposium attracted a few dozen IT-focused physicians to a conference center in Coeur dAlene, Idaho.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center are incorporating radiation dose exposure reports into the EMR, an effort that they hope will lead to an accurate assessment of whether any cancer risk is associated with low-dose radiation exposure from medical imaging tests, based on an article in Februarys Journal of the American College of Radiology.

The percentage of Medicare recipients in California will increase with the states elderly population, and is expected to more than double between 2000 and 2030, according to a report from California Healthcare Foundation.

GE Global Research, a subsidiary of GE has been awarded a four-year, $3.27 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to aid the development of a new cryogen-free magnet technology.

The announcement of about Apples iPad was a hot topic this week, and Apple claims the iPad will usher in nothing less than a rewrite of the way information is exchanged. The company claims the machines will deliver a wider variety of data, including video and other imagescompared with data the tablet PCs can now support, in a more portable package. What would this mean for healthcare?

McKesson has reported that revenues for the 2010 third quarter, which ended Dec. 31, 2009, were $28.3 billion compared with $27.1 billion a year ago. The company also posted a net income of $326 million in this quarter, compared with a net loss of $20 million in the third quarter of 2009.

St. Jude Medical has reported strong year-over-year and 2009 fourth quarter net income.