George Hripcsak, MD, co-chair of the HIT Policy Committee's Meaningful Use Workgroup, presented an approximate timeline for meaningful use measurements yesterday during a meeting of the HIT Policy Committee, held to discuss pending meaningful use definitions in relation to specialty practices and small providers. In laying out the timeline, Hripsak noted that not all potential objectives and measures will be appropriate for all U.S. healthcare facilities.

CalOptima, a Medicaid managed care plan serving Orange County, Calif., has identified the potential loss of past medical claims information for approximately 68,000 of its members that was stored on electronic media devices.

Vital Images, a developer of advanced visualization and analysis software, and IT and medical technology vendor Sectra have expanded their partnership by merging products.

Agfa HealthCare (Booth #8324) is presenting a series of solutions for both computed radiography and direct radiography, as well as for imaging informatics and mammography at the 2009 Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) conference.

AccelaRAD (Booth #2643) will unveil its expanded SeeMyRadiology.com platform to provide universal access to medical images through a Web portal for hospitals, radiologists, physicians and patients at the 2009 Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) meeting.

A decade of improvement in the quality of healthcare provided in the United States came to a halt in 2008, according to a report issued last week by the National Committee for Quality Assurance.

Representatives of two of the three data and disease management Medicare Demonstration Programs that did not get cancelled discussed their programs' success strategies at the sixth annual Connected Health Symposium last week in Boston.

BOSTON--A projected shortage of some 50,000 health IT professionals in the United States is most likely an underestimate by the federal government, according to a panel discussion at the Connected Health Symposium on Thursday.