Lifespan is a five-hospital system in Providence, R.I., managing more than 500,000 radiology and cardiology exams per year. To balance the image management needs across departments, meet the daily demands of access to full clinical information across their health system with an eye on future participation in the Accountable Care initiative, Lifespan is embarking on a multi-year journey to leverage IT infrastructure as a strategic asset and utilize a combination of an enterprise vendor neutral archive coupled with archive neutral PACS for radiology, cardiology, endoscopy and other departments.

Boston Scientific has signed a definitive agreement to acquire BridgePoint Medical, a privately held company based in Minneapolis, which develops a catheter-based system to treat coronary chronic total occlusions (CTOs).

Radiologists and other imaging professionals in the U.S. are getting involved in efforts to improve healthcare quality using health information systemsby increasing the amount and quality of information, including patients histories and imaging exams, available to members of the care team at the point of care. Health information exchange (HIE) may be crucial to meeting this goal.

GE Healthcare and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) have formed a collaboration aimed at building a pipeline of Wisconsin-based medical imaging software developers and researchers. As part of the collaboration, GE has pledged more than $3 million toward the GE Healthcare Center for Advanced Computational Imaging at UWM.

Elsevier has acquired ExitCare, an enterprise-wide technology for patient education and discharge instructions, which provides peer-reviewed patient education and discharge instructions for clinicians and patients.

Agfa HealthCare has introduced an electronic monitoring service for Impax PACS worldwide designed to prevent unexpected downtime in the healthcare environment.

Agfa HealthCare has launched the Impax Data Center 3.0, a PACS and storage vendor neutral archive.

St. Vincent Hospital, a member of the Hospital Sisters Health System in Green Bay, Wis., will implement Merge Healthcares cardiology suite to capture, manage and display cardiac images, as well as hemodynamics and ECG data, across its enterprise.