Australias Department of Health and Aging will get assistance in the design and implementation of the countrys Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) system from Accenture.

The Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC) announced that the Electronic Health Records of Rhode Island (EHRRI), a nonprofit comprised of five Rhode Island-based physician groups with the purpose of facilitating the adoption and use of EHRs, has donated activities and operations to MAeHC.

Johns Hopkins biomedical graduate students may end up taking specific courses on key biological processesgene expression, metabolism, cell fate and functionif the university decides to change its structure for the first time in 30 years, a move two education leaders advocate in a commentary scheduled for publication in the Aug. 19 issue of Cell.

When examining how to better manage the processes and advanced imaging data across a healthcare enterprise, administrators are going to have to take a business savvy approach to their practices, said presenters at this weeks AHRA conference in Dallas.

Researchers identified five solutions to issues encountered during the implementation of procedures to reduce transmission of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in six intensive care units. Those lessons can serve as building blocks for future change initiatives, authors asserted in a study published in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemology.

Nuance Communications has released Dragon Medical Practice Edition, which seeks to help clinicians and healthcare organizations to create medical notes into any EHR.

Advanced MRI techniques can be used to detect subtle changes in joint cartilage microstructureand provide physicians a diagnostic tool for finding key markers of early osteoarthritis (OA), according to a review published in the July issue of Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

Although natural language processing (NLP) research in the clinical setting has occurred since the 1960s, progress in developing NLP applications for clinical text has been slow and lags behind progress made in the general NLP domain, according to an editorial in the September issue of Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.