Al Amal Hospital in Doha, Qatar, is replacing its four-year-old linear accelerators with Trilogy and Clinac iX devices from Varian Medical Systems.

Preliminary results show that a shortened course of radiation therapy for prostate cancer, stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT), provides good PSA response for early stage cancer and has the same side effects as other treatments, according to a March 15 study in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics.

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have produced the first quantitative analysis of the increase in the number of hospitalists, based on Medicare data. In an article in the March 12 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the authors reveal that the percentage of internal medicine physicians practicing as hospitalists jumped from 5.9 percent in 1995 to 19 percent in 2006.

The healthcare IT funding provisions of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act provides welcome news to technology suppliers in light of a projected 0.1 percent growth rate for the U.S. economy in 2009, according to new research from IDC's Industry Insights Companies.

Helios Kliniken Group in Berlin is acquiring nine linear accelerators from Varian Medical Systems, the majority of them equipped with RapidArc technology.

Healthcare IT provisions in the recently passed economic stimulus bill suggest that new financial incentives will still leave many physicians in small practices facing significant up-front implementation costs, according to an analysis by healthcare business strategy and public policy research firm Avalere Health.

Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is seeking nominations for the newly created HIT Standards Committee and HIT Policy Committee.

In an effort to resolve policy differences among states on sharing electronic health information, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) will release recommendations for handling interstate sharing next month from the Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration.