CHICAGOInformatics nurse professionals regularly use their expertise to promote the adoption of more effective, higher quality clinical applications within their organizations, which contributes significantly to patient safety, change management and usability of systems, according to findings from the 2009 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Nursing Informatics Impact survey released this week at the 2009 HIMSS conference.

The declining global economy is impacting the IT industry, according to a forecast from market research firm Gartner, worldwide IT spending will total $3.2 trillion in 2009, a 3.8 percent decline from 2008 revenue of nearly $3.4 trillion.

Harry Totonis has been named president and CEO of e-prescribing provider Surescripts, effective immediately.

Digital pathology solutions provider BioImagene has released a new Ki-67 prostate image analysis algorithm, which is used to detect and provide quantitative measurement of the protein biomarker Ki-67, as part of Virtuoso, a suite of web-based software applications for digital pathology.

Digisonics, an image management and reporting systems provider, has received orders from four U.S. healthcare providers.

Royal Philips Electronics will equip its dictation microphone SpeechMike with SpeechControl, allowing SpeechMike to be used with its Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition program.

InSight Health Services Holdings, through a subsidiary, has entered into a seven-year agreement with Perot Systems to provide revenue cycle services, technology upgrade implementation and IT services.

Even when their products are implicated in harm to patients, manufacturers of health IT have contractual and legal protection that renders them virtually "liability-free," according to a March 25 commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association.