The very low levels of adoption of EHRs in U.S. hospitals suggest that policymakers face substantial obstacles to the achievement of healthcare performance goals that depend on health IT, according to a survey in the April 16 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

U.S. hospitals have failed to adequately protect patient safety and too many hospitals have failed to implement standards known to improve quality and save lives, according to the 2008 Leapfrog hospital survey.

Viztek, a medical imaging solutions provider, has released a web-based interface with EMR systems for its family of PACS offerings.

TeraMedica Healthcare Technology, a Milwaukee-based healthcare informatics company, has launched its new Univision-Imageport enterprise viewer.

President Barack Obama announced plans Thursday to create a joint virtual lifetime electronic record that will improve care and services to transitioning veterans by easing the flow of medical records between the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs administrations.

The University of Oklahoma School of Community Medicine and IBM have partnered to build an EMR-enabled primary care practice model that will meet President Obama's vision of an information-based, connected healthcare system.

A rush of applications to meet a March 31 deadline for applying for the 2008 cycle of testing brought the number of ambulatory EHR products seeking to become certified by the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) to 64.

The Federal Health Architecture, an E-Gov initiative led by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), is making free software available as a first step to help public and private health information technology systems communicate to the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN).