Chip Means

Thirty-seven hospitals and 300 clinics in South Africa will implement hospital information systems as part of an initiative to deliver EHRs to all patients in the Gauteng province.

Economically healthy industries empower workers to make decisions, compensate based on productivity and use a lot of information technology. The healthcare industry doesn't do any of this – yet.

Electronic technology will soon be considered as fundamental to medicine as the stethoscope, according to National Coordinator for Health Information Technology David Blumenthal, MD.

Sweden rolled out the first stage of the Swedish National Patient Summary initiative last month, according to the project's partnering IT vendors, InterSystems and Tieto. The nationwide EHR is billed as one of the first of its kind in the world.

Department of Defense agents last week searched the Malvern, Pa. headquarters of Siemens Medical Solutions in a reported investigation into a military contract Siemens was awarded in recent weeks.

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's 2009 Annual Conference and Exhibition opened Sunday morning here in Chicago.

The Department of Health and Human Services has announced David Blumenthal, MD, as the Obama Administration's National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

Healthcare speech recognition vendor Nuance has released its Dragon Medical 10 solution for use in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The company claims the latest release of the tool is 20 percent more accurate and nearly twice as fast as its previous iteration.

California Assemblyman Joel Anderson wants to prevent users of Google Maps from seeing detailed photos of the nation's hospitals.

As we sat down to plan our new Web site, we knew the most valuable improvement we could make would be to increase our readers' involvement and interaction with us and each other.