Angie's List announced on Wednesday a partnership that will allow its members to access Healthcare Blue Book, a free pricing tool that aids consumers and companies in determining and negotiating fair healthcare prices.

Officials say the service is designed to help patients shop around for the best price before they even agree to treatment and incur those bills.

New research concludes that the pace of automating and integrating care management workflows into health IT systems, remains slow.
 
The findings come out of "The 2010 Health Information Technology Survey: How Technology Is Changing the Practice of Case Management" report, conducted by TCS Healthcare Technologies (TCS) in conjunction with the Case Management Society of America (CMSA) and the American Board of Quality Assurance and Utilization Review Physicians, Inc. (ABQAURP).

There seems to be more and more money going into biomedical research, with not enough product coming out, according to researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

This is where iMedConsent comes into play.

Researchers at UTHealth have employed Dialog Medical’s automated consent solution to streamline their research processes. One of the drivers is decreasing administrative burden, in addition to decreasing regulatory burden.

Meaningful use incentives make quality – and quality reporting – an integral component of electronic health records. To help providers and vendors better understand the details behind those imperatives, HIMSS has introduced Quality 101, a new online primer on quality measurement.
 

The government will distribute nearly $17 million for patient-centered outcomes research that is supported by health information technology and data systems, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced Wednesday.

Cincinnati and Detroit are the two final pilot communities selected under the new Beacon Community Program that is using health information technology to help tackle leading health problems in communities across the country. Between them they will receive $30 million in government money to help in their work.

ONC chief David Blumenthal, delivered the news Thursday at the Henry Ford Health Center in Detroit , while HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was in Cincinnati to make the announcement at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

Thomson Reuters announced Wednesday that it has acquired Healthcare Data Management, Inc., a King of Prussia, Pa.-based health plan benchmarking firm that will now become part of the Healthcare & Science business of Thomson Reuters.

Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman celebrated the launch of the newly-combined company today by presiding over the NASDAQ opening bell.

The merger of Allscripts with Eclipsys will help connect 180,000 physicians, 1,500 hospitals and 10,000 post-acute organizations, making the new company better positioned to address the serious lack of information connectivity across healthcare.

Weno Healthcare Inc. has applied to become a temporary electronic health record certification body and, if accepted, plans to shake up the competition.

CSC, a Falls Church, Va.-based provider of technology-enabled solutions, has received EuroRec certification for its Clinical Suite.

EuroRec is the European not-for-profit certification organization dedicated to promoting high-quality Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems throughout Europe.

People want to be informed and asked for consent before deciding whether to share their genetic information in a federal database, according to a Group Health study that bills itself as the first to ask patients about sharing their data.

The study "Glad You Asked," conducted by researchers at Group Health Research Institute and the University of Washington (UW), is published in the September 2010 Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics.

Maine's HealthInfoNet, the statewide health information exchange, has selected Santa Monica, Calif.-based Orion Health as its primary technology provider to help the HIE expand.

HealthInfoNet today involves six healthcare organizations and many of their affiliated hospitals and physician practices that annually care for more than half of Maine's residents.

Forty-six organizations have showed their support for the Markle Foundation’s recommendations for privacy and security practices for the “blue button,” which would allow patients to have instant access to their healthcare records.

Telehealth Solutions has been chosen for the national framework agreement to provide telehealth, telecare and telecoaching technology to the entire UK public sector by Buying Solutions - the UK's official procurement partner.

Buying Solutions carries out procurement for all UK public services and is part of the Efficiency and Reform Group within the Cabinet Office. Its role is to streamline the process of public sector purchasing, which is subject to strict controls that ensure fair and responsible spending of public funds, officials said.

The not-for-profit Sutter Health network, in Sacramento, Calif., is helping its patients connect not only with its resources, but also with doctors, clinics and ERs nationwide, using a free application that they can download on their smartphones.

Sutter Health is using technology called iTriage, a healthcare information software product introduced by Healthagen, LLC . iTriage was developed in 2008 by emergency room physicians, Peter Hudson, MD, who is co-founder and CEO of Healthagen and Wayne Guerra MD, who is the company's co-founder and chief medical officer.

The Pediatric Heart Transplant Program at NewYork-Presbyterian/Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital is launching a one-year program that will use a text messaging platform to increase medication adherence in its teenage heart transplant patients.

The hospital is working with CareSpeak Communications Inc., a privately held mobile health company in New Jersey, which is providing the two-way technology system that will send the medication alerts to the patients.

The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) and the Drummond Group are the first to pass government muster as authorized to test and certify electronic health record systems to qualify for meaningful use incentives under the stimulus package. There are more to come.

The merger of two Atlanta-based technology firms with extensive footprints in the payer sector is designed to provide health plans and insurers with access to more consumer health data.

Detroit Medical Center executives say they have achieved improved patient safety and saved $5 million to boot, thanks to DMC's system-wide electronic medical system.

It is the second year in a row in which computer-based healthcare information processing created major improvements in quality of care and cost-savings for DMC's eight hospitals, officials said.

HealthInfoNet, the nonprofit organization managing the Health Information Exchange (HIE) for the State of Maine, announced Monday that it will partner with Health Language, Inc. (HLI) as it transitions from a two-year demonstration project to a full statewide HIE implementation.