Sentara Healthcare and MDLIVE has entered a partnership that will allow the integrated healthcare system to expand healthcare access by offering patients telehealth consults with the health IT vendors communications platform.

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, has experienced its second data breach this year, this time as a result of a wayward USB thumb drive.

There is ongoing debate over the money-saving potential of EHRs, with some research showing their ability to reduce provider costs and some showing their ability to bust provider budgets. The lack of consistency suggests past research has inappropriately framed the debate, according to an August working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

More than half of U.S. hospitals, 54 percent, plan to purchase products designed to help integrate medical devices with EMRs over the next two years.

This is certainly a disturbing trend: this weeks news brought yet another data breach to the forefront. This time, an unauthorized user gained access to and encrypted the server of a small Midwestern surgical practice and essentially held the information hostage in exchange for the password needed to regain access to the server.

ORLANDO, Fla.In the opening keynote presentation Aug. 14 at the 40th annual meeting of AHRA: the Association for Medical Imaging Management, Brian R. Klepper, PhD, had a warning for the radiology administrators in attendance: Hes coming to take your volumes.

Read on for part 2 of our article on the latest privacy and security information. Linn Foster Freedman, JD, an attorney with Nixon Peabody, presented a wealth of information during a recent program presented by the Rhode Island Quality Institute, about how hospitals need to better protect themselves against potential privacy and security vulnerabilities, such as data breaches.

Three in four patients who present at emergency departments with symptoms of acute MI (AMI) may be safely ruled out or accurately ruled in within an hour using a high sensitivity troponin algorithm, researchers reported online Aug. 13 in Archives of Internal Medicine. But an accompanying editorial cautioned that its implementation in general practice may be stymied by costs, complexity and confounding comorbidities.