Hospitals awarded five stars by HealthGrades in 2011 provided better care than their lower-scoring counterparts. According to a HealthGrades report released Oct. 18, patients had a 73 percent lower risk of dying in a five-star hospital than in a one-star hospital.

As the conditions of participation in Medicare and Medicaid have not changed since 1986, the time has come for a full review. That's according to softly stated yet hard-hitting commentary published online Oct. 18 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Two decades ago, hospitals preventive maintenance (PM) strategies focused on upholding the electrical integrity of medical devices. In the years since, clinical engineering departments have been tailoring more advanced PM strategies. In the most forward-looking hospitals and healthcare systems, risk-based methods include careful evaluation of equipment inventories to decide if, when and how often to intervene throughout the lifecycle of many thousands of devices.

Healthcare services and medical devices attracted the largest share of "angel" investments in the first and second quarters of 2011, garnering 25 percent of all such investments, according to a report by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire.

HP and Lucile Packard Childrens Hospital at Stanford, Cali., have developed a patient status system that prompted a treatment change in one-third of patients during a single-center study.

SonoSite of Bothell, Wash., has released a new product for monitoring patients' hemodynamic profiles in the hospital. Called the BioZ Cardio Profile, the system offers anesthesiologists a new tool for continuous, noninvasive fluid management.

U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-M.N.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) have introduced the Medical Device Regulatory Improvement Act, which aims to decrease regulatory burdens on new medical devices to spur innovation.

Nirvanix of San Diego, said that Cerner will deploy as part of its Skybox Storage technology, an on-demand managed storage service based on a Nirvanixs private cloud storage technology.