Western medicine has become so closely associated with high-tech medical equipment that it’s top of mind even for patients.

Does any of this sound familiar to the CMIOs? A physician colleague stops you in the hall to tell you about a cool new application that he or she saw at a conference. “It downloads information from our system and creates a readmission risk score. All we need to do is create the data feed from our system. The vendor said it was easy.”

Consumers have increasingly used social media networks to share news and maintain personal relationships, but healthcare has been slow to establish its presence in this virtual landscape. As more patients turn to the internet for healthcare needs, healthcare professionals are presented with a powerful tool to help bridge a gap in patient-provider communications.

Providers across the U.S. are facing the same set of problems. Imaging data volumes are increasing and more storage is needed. Simultaneously, more departments outside of radiology are looking to store images, and some IT departments simply don’t have the storage capacity. Many are finding an answer in the cloud, and with the explosive growth of cloud-based image management systems, it seems only a matter of time before they become
the standard in healthcare.

Early RFID adopter Tallahassee Memorial finds the ROI soft but substantial.

In this week’s news, yet another data breach continues the trend but, on the plus side, small steps toward greater interoperability and acceptance of quality measures were taken.

How much more is being spent on medical devices as a share of national health expenditures compared with 30 years ago? Medical device spending is about the same, according to research conducted by Guy King, a former chief actuary of the Health Care Financing Administration, now called the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

A Rhode Island medical organization with 19 locations across the state has been awarded the 2012 Ambulatory HIMSS Davies Award of Excellence presented by the Health Information Management & Systems Society.