HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced more than $32 million in funding on Monday aimed at boosting access to healthcare service in rural areas, including approximately $4 million for telehealth projects.

The Telehealth Network Grant Program will receive more than $2 million of this rural healthcare funding. The program helps communities build capacity to develop sustainable telehealth programs and networks.  
 
Grantees are:

Hyderabad’s airport is a symbol of India’s economic success: organized, modern, efficient. The city is host to this year’s eIndia, the country’s largest ICT event – with a dedicated track on eHealth. The question is, what are the opportunities for eHealth in India? I am here to find out.

MEDS-ED Link, a project of the Northern Virginia Regional Health Information Organization (NoVaRHIO) done in conjunction with Inova Health System and GE Healthcare, launched on Monday. It provides emergency physicians access to patient medication histories.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has awarded a $200 million contract to HP Enterprise Services for software applications related to Medicare Part B claims processing and the delivery of services to beneficiaries.

The Medicare Part B Shared System Maintainer contract is for one base year with seven one-year renewal options. CMS carriers and Medicare administrative contractors use Medicare's Multi-Carrier System (MCS) to process approximately 750 million Medicare Part B claims annually.

Yale School of Medicine is in the process of notifying approximately 1,000 individuals whose clinical health information was contained on a laptop computer that was recently stolen.

According to officials, the computer was stolen from the office of a data analyst at the Yale School of Medicine on the night of July 28 and was reported missing the next morning.

The federal Health IT Policy Committee has endorsed a set of recommendations on when healthcare providers must obtain consent before exchanging patient heath records electronically with other clinicians, testing labs or health information exchange (HIE) networks.

Macquarie University Hospital performed Australia's first Gamma Knife surgery with its new Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion system on Aug. 3, making it the country's first center capable of providing dedicated intracranial radiosurgery.

MUH and the Australian School of Advanced Medicine (ASAM) partnered with Genesis Care, an Australia-based provider of cancer management services, to procure the system, which is located in Genesis Care's radiation therapy department at MUH.

The patients at hospitals with the most advanced type of electronic medical records are likely to spend 22.4 percent less time in the emergency room than at other hospitals, a new study from the W.P.Carey School of Business at Arizona State University shows.

Physicians who use an automated, electronic medical record tracking system to follow up on patients with an abnormal Pap test could increase the number of women who achieve diagnostic resolution and do so in less time than using traditional methods, according to new research.

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) reported their findings in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

The Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has awarded a three-year demonstration $3 million grant aimed at reducing birth-related injuries. The grant supports quality improvement and data analysis initiatives.

AHRQ gave the award to Fairview Health Services in Minneapolis makes it possible for the Premier healthcare alliance Prenatal Safety Initiative to extend through June 2013.

athenahealth, of Watertown, Mass., has announced that it will offer its Web-based EHR service, athenaClinicals, as a standalone offering. Historically, clients were required to adopt athenahealth’s Web-based billing and practice management service, athenaCollector in order to use athenaClinicals as part of a fully-integrated platform. The athenaClinicals standalone option will offer athenahealth’s hospital and enterprise clients more flexibility as they execute on their affiliated and clinical community connectivity programs.

Research firm Kalorama cites high rates of physician use of smartphones and PDAs and available applications among many factors making healthcare ideal for smartphone sales.

Intel has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire security giant McAfee – a deal executives say underscores the crucial importance of security to information technology, and represents a "fundamentally new approach involving software, hardware and services."

The merger will see Intel purchase all of McAfee's common stock at $48 per share in cash, for approximately $7.68 billion.


The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has issued guidelines to state Medicaid directors regarding federal funding for the administration costs associated with Medicaid healthcare information technology initiatives.

With government incentives only offsetting EHR costs by about 15 to 20 percent, providers should not only be prepared to make a significant investment in IT, but should also consider a "radical new approach to IT," say the authors of a new study.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) will announce the names of the authorized testing and certification bodies (ATCB) "soon," according to Carol Bean, ONC's division director for certification and testing.

The Mississippi Division of Medicaid and Shared Health have launched an electronic health record and electronic prescribing system for more than one half million Medicaid beneficiaries.

Shared Health is one of the largest public/private health information exchanges (HIE) in the country with the records of nearly four million patients. The rollout of an electronic medical record and e-prescribing further advances Shared Health's growth strategy, officials say.

A new research report from MarketsandMarkets (M&M), a U.S.-based global market research and consulting firm, shows that the telemedicine market in Brazil, Russia, India and China can be expected grow to nearly half a billion dollars in the coming years.

A radiology professor is calling on radiologists across the country to mount a campaign against the overuse of medical imaging.

Overuse of medical imaging services exposes patients to unnecessary radiation and adds to healthcare costs, according to "Addressing Overutilization in Medical Imaging," which is published online and in the October issue of the journal Radiology.
 

Maine healthcare providers launched their first official telehealth summit on Tuesday with a message to the rest of the country: The first state to see the sun rise each day also aims to be one of the leaders in this rapidly growing healthcare delivery philosophy.