News

We love the prospect of a new year ahead - 365 new days. It's just a calendar, of course, a tool for ordering days, setting meetings, making appointments and remembering birthdays. But as we move from the last day of one year to the first day of the next, our Outlook and Google calendars seem so much more than a way to schedule yet more tasks, more appointments, more projects and more deadlines.

As the National Football League playoffs kick-off this month, there will be no shortage of excitement on the gridiron. There will also be one big difference taking place behind the scenes: The NFL will make the switch from paper to electronic health records.

The burgeoning and highly complex field of computational medicine is showing promise for the treatment of illnesses such as Alzheimer's, heart disease, cancer and more, as technology and troves of data are harnessed to investigate the underpinnings and map the progression of diseases.

Xenex Healthcare Services, a provider of ultraviolet (UV) room disinfection, has announced that the Veterans Health Care System in central Texas is using its mercury-free UV light technology to disinfect hospital rooms and prevent hospital-acquired infections (HAI).

As more health organizations use cloud-based IT services, a patient privacy advocacy group is urging HHS to issue guidance on HIPAA and the cloud.

Alisa Ray, the first executive director of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), has been newly named as the organization's CEO.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT wants to use EHR certification criteria to make it easier for physicians to report patient safety events. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will encourage providers to report adverse events to patient safety organizations, and ONC will propose certification requirements that, where appropriate, EHRs can report safety events in AHRQ's Common Formats.

IDC Health Insights group vice president is expecting that, by early March, the healthcare realm will see more HIPAA-compliant cloud services and an influx of organizations willing to sign HIPAA Business Associate Agreements.

Under terms of the $!7 million contract, SAIC will provide operational support for the USCG's Integrated Health Information System.

The U.S. Coast Guard has awarded a $17 million contract to Science Applications International Corporation to provide services and operational support for USCG's Integrated Health Information System (IHiS), officials announced this month.