URAC and the Leapfrog Group have partnered to develop the Excellence in Hospital Website Transparency Best Practices Awards and Acknowledgement Program to identify outstanding hospital websites that promote transparency of quality measures in a manner that is useful and user-friendly for consumers. All hospitals that publically report their Leapfrog Hospital Survey results are eligible.

Monterey, California—Language Line Services, the world’s leading provider of translation and interpretation services, will collaborate with the Society for Healthcare Consumer Advocacy (SHCA) as a key sponsor at its 2012 Annual Conference in Austin, Texas set for April 17-20, 2012. SHCA is a nonprofit patient advocacy organization affiliated with the American Hospital Association.

South San Francisco—First Databank (FDB), a leading provider of clinical drug knowledge that improves medication-related decisions and patient outcomes, announced its new alert management solution, FDB AlertSpace™, designed to address alert fatigue in computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems, has achieved unprecedented industry acceptance among various U.S. hospital institutions.

Panama City, Florida—iSirona®, a provider of simplified solutions for medical device integration, today announced DeviceConX 4.0, iSirona’s latest version of its connectivity software. Key components of this latest version include an enterprise architecture and management console, which provide a truly enterprise-level solution for device connectivity management.

Englewood, Colorado and Chicago—To help physician practices navigate the challenging health information exchange (HIE) environment, HIMSS and MGMA-ACMPE have introduced a new online resource, The Ambulatory Health Information Exchange Toolkit . The toolkit, targeted to ambulatory practices, serves as an important resource for practices looking for a pathway toward sharing and receiving patient information in an electronic format and participating in a health information exchange organization.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin—True Process, Inc., a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, healthcare information technology services provider and software engineering firm, has purchased VeriScan from Hospira, Inc., the world’s leading provider of injectable drugs and infusion technologies.

Panama City, Florida—iSirona®, a provider of simplified solutions for medical device integration, announced that Children’s Hospital and Medical Center of Omaha, Nebraska, will be implementing iSirona’s device connectivity solution in conjunction with the launch of their new Epic EMR. Ranked one of the top pediatric hospitals for orthopedics and cardiology in the nation, Children’s will be ultimately connecting devices enterprise-wide-across in-patient care areas, oncology units, the emergency department and pre- and post-operative care units.

Las Vegas—Awarepoint Corporation, the leading provider of real-time location system (RTLS) solutions for healthcare, announced that NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital has successfully deployed its real-time location system at its Columbia University Medical Center campus to enhance workflow, quality of care, and patient satisfaction in perioperative areas of the internationally renowned hospital.

Newton, Massachusetts—According to a study released at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference,[1] physicians believe that open-access image-sharing technology can improve patient outcomes.