The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is offering grants of up to $250,000 for fast-track research that will provide evidence to inform policymakers in development of Meaningful Use Stage 3 EHR objectives.

The Federal Health Architecture (FHA) has released CONNECT 4.0, an open-source platform for enabling secure health information exchange that supports current federal IT standards and Meaningful Use Stage 2 core objectives related to the secure electronic exchange of information through CONNECT’s support of Direct project specifications and NwHIN transports.

The number of patients using telehealth services is expected to increase six-fold between 2012 and 2017, from 227,000 patients to 1.3 million patients, according to a report from IMS Research.

M*Modal, a developer of clinical documentation, computer-assisted coding (CAC) and speech understanding technologies, will provide its M*Modal Fluency for Coding workflow platform to Mercy Health System. This cloud-based application delivers workflow and CAC services, as well as ICD-10 support.

The National Health Service Corps awarded more than $10 million in funding for loan repayment to 87 medical students in 29 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, who will serve as primary care doctors and help strengthen the healthcare workforce, according to Department of Health and Human Services' Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

eClinicalWorks has launched a patient engagement initiative aimed to improve communication channels between patients and healthcare providers. The company is investing an additional $25 million over the next 12 months to expand and update its patient engagement tools under its business unit Health & Online Wellness (healow).

Health IT interventions have improved access to obesity treatment and rates of screening; however, the impact on weight loss and other health outcomes remains understudied and inconsistent. This study was published in the January issue of Pediatrics.

Inadequate clinical information systems that lacked the ability to identify which patients should receive decision aids or the ability to capture whether patients' views were considered in subsequent care are some of the biggest challenges facing primary care physicians seeking to implement shared decision making. The results of an eight-site demonstration was published in the February issue of Health Affairs.