Two U.S. healthcare facilities have signed multi-year contracts with Siemens Healthcare, which include the installation of Siemens' Soarian Health Information System (HIS) platform. An additional facility also signed a multi-year contract for Soarian and Siemens' MedSeries4, a web-based HIS designed for community hospitals.

The National eHealth Collaborative, formerly known as the American Health Information Community (AHIC) Successor, may have been legislated out of existence with the passage of healthcare IT provisions in the recent economic stimulus bill.

The Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG) has named Nancy Soto as director of the protocol development and regulatory compliance department.

Taiwan's largest hospital has begun treatments for head and neck cancer using RapidArc technology from Varian Medical Systems.

When President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act on Feb. 17, he not only helped to stimulate the lagging U.S. economy, he also paved the way to providing every physician in America an affordable means to enter the digital era of medicine by implementing an EHR.

A comprehensive set of insurance, payment and system reforms could guarantee affordable health insurance coverage, improve health outcomes and slow the growth of health spending by $3 trillion by the end of the next decade, according to a report released Feb. 19 by the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System.

The global hospital information systems market will climb past$35 billion by 2015, with the United States representing the largest consumer of the technology, according to a report by Global Industry Analysts.

A widely used blood pressure medication may be the key to preventing brain function loss common after radiation treatment, and could offer an improved quality of life for cancer patients, according to a study published in this month's International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, Physics.