Todd Park, co-founder of athenahealth and a current member of the board of directors of the Watertown, Mass.-based company, has been named chief technology officer (CTO) for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Initiate Systems, a provider of data-management solutions, has launched the Initiate Catalyst software platform for independent software vendors.

A team of nanomaterial scientists, medical physicists and cancer biologists at the University of North Carolina has developed smaller, lower-cost x-ray tubes packed with sharp-tipped carbon nanotubes for cancer research and treatment. The technology was presented this week at the 2009 meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), in Anaheim, Calif.

Initiate Systems, a provider of multi-domain master-data management solutions for information sharing and data quality, has formed a partnership with Datanomic, a provider of data-quality technology.

Jay Holland, MD, of Little Rock, Ark., Sarah Elizabeth Miller of England, Ark., and Candida Griffin of Little Rock, have pled guilty to HIPAA violation charges, according to the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, Jane W. Duke.

A story last year in Health Imaging News reported that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had proposed to adopt the ICD-10 code set to replace the ICD-9 code set for diagnoses and procedures by October 2011. In response to strident objections from physicians and payors pushing back against the ambitious timeframe for ICD-10 implementation offered by HHS, the department extended its deadline to October 2013. Fast-forward to the present and professional associations are warning healthcare providers to formulate their ICD-10 plans and begin implementation this coming January. The stakes are high for practices that serve Medicare beneficiaries; HHS has declared it only will reimburse claims with ICD-10 codes after the 2013 deadline. From a diagnostic perspective, the HHS proposal is a necessary and prudent step: ICD-10 has space for more than 155,000 codes, which allow for far more specificity and detail than the currently employed ICD-9, which is limited to 17,000 codes.

Medfusion, a provider of patient-to-provider online communication solutions, has acquired Medem's iHealth suite of services for an undisclosed sum.

3M Health Information Systems and CodeRyte have signed an agreement to integrate CodeRyte's outpatient computer-assisted coding technology with the 3M Codefinder Software to produce the 3M Codefinder Auto Edition, powered by CodeRyte technology.