Jay Holland, MD, of Little Rock, Ark., Sarah Elizabeth Miller of England, Ark., and Candida Griffin of Little Rock, have pled guilty to HIPAA violation charges, according to the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, Jane W. Duke.

A story last year in Health Imaging News reported that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had proposed to adopt the ICD-10 code set to replace the ICD-9 code set for diagnoses and procedures by October 2011. In response to strident objections from physicians and payors pushing back against the ambitious timeframe for ICD-10 implementation offered by HHS, the department extended its deadline to October 2013. Fast-forward to the present and professional associations are warning healthcare providers to formulate their ICD-10 plans and begin implementation this coming January. The stakes are high for practices that serve Medicare beneficiaries; HHS has declared it only will reimburse claims with ICD-10 codes after the 2013 deadline. From a diagnostic perspective, the HHS proposal is a necessary and prudent step: ICD-10 has space for more than 155,000 codes, which allow for far more specificity and detail than the currently employed ICD-9, which is limited to 17,000 codes.

Imagine Software, a provider of medical billing technology, has named Tom Kushman as a vice president.

Medfusion, a provider of patient-to-provider online communication solutions, has acquired Medem's iHealth suite of services for an undisclosed sum.

3M Health Information Systems and CodeRyte have signed an agreement to integrate CodeRyte's outpatient computer-assisted coding technology with the 3M Codefinder Software to produce the 3M Codefinder Auto Edition, powered by CodeRyte technology.

A new one-year master's degree program designed to prepare graduates for informatics leadership positions in clinical, public health and scientific settings will be offered beginning in September by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

University of California San Diego's (UCSD) Moores Cancer Center has sent a letter to 30,000 patients, after a hacker breached its computers and gained access to patients' personal information, according to a report in the San Diego Union Tribune.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will temporarily halt 45 IT projects which are either behind schedule or over budget. The projects will be reviewed, and the agency will determine whether they will be continued.