Relatively few U.S. hospitalsbetween 2 and 12 percentuse EHRs, according to a hospital IT adoption survey, conducted in conjunction with the American Hospital Association (AHA).

GE Healthcare has introduced the Centricity Precision Reporting, in which workflow is wedded with a speech understanding engine developed by M*Modal to capture patient data throughout the radiology reporting process.

Six federal agencies have developed an interface for the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) that they plan to make available to the public at no cost in March 2009.

The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) has certified inpatient and emergency department (ED) EHR products, as well as a special enterprise EHR certification for vendors that provide ambulatory, inpatient, and ED EHRs that are interoperable.

Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefit management company, has received extortion letters threatening to release private health information of clients, and a number of its individual clients have received letters threatening to expose their personal information.

Officials at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have chosen four personal health record (PHR) vendors to participate in a pilot program for Medicare recipients in Utah and Arizona.

IBA Health, owner of software developer iSoft, has officially launched Lorenzo, EMR software that the company said is promised to three-fifths of the English NHS hospital trusts.

One of the answers to contain skyrocketing healthcare costs is to set up an IT infrastructure that allows consumers to proactively monitor their health. The key for such a system to take hold, however, is for the government to reimburse physicians for remote house calls, according to Craig Barrett, PhD, chairman of the board of Intel, who gave the keynote address Sunday night at the American Heart Association (AHA) Scientific Sessions in New Orleans.