McKesson has reported increased revenues and net income for the 2010 fourth quarter, as well as its fiscal year, compared with the 2009 fourth quarter and fiscal year.

Advanced EMR applications may increase hospital costs and nurse staffing levels, as well as increase complications and decrease mortality for some conditions, according to a study published online recently in Health Services Research.

The Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has posted a request for information to understand the interests of individuals regarding protected health information (PHI) disclosures and the administrative burden on covered entities and business associates of accounting for such disclosures.

Virtual Radiologic will release its third generation of vRad Enterprise Connect, a radiology workflow software platform, in the summer.

The U.S. system of billing third parties for health care services is complex, expensive and inefficient, and physicians end up using nearly 12 percent of their net patient service revenue to cover the costs of excessive administrative complexity, according to an article in the April edition of Health Affairs.

The proposed program to certify EHR technology will create challenges for the government in ensuring the process has sufficient capacity to handle demand in the early months of the program while achieving consistent results from the various organizations that will be certifying systems, according to a letter by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME).

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that several states and Puerto Rico will receive a total of $8.2 million in federal matching funds for planning activities necessary to implement the EHR incentive program established by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

Premier healthcare alliance, which consists of more than 2,300 U.S. hospitals and 66,000 healthcare sites, has launched a new health IT plan that will seek to leverage its hospitals performance improvement data and knowledge sharing.