HIMSS Analytics recognizes the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City, Iowa, with its Stage 7 Award. The Stage 7 award represents attainment of the highest level on the Electronic Medical Records Adoption Model (EMRAM), which is used to track EMR progress at hospitals and health systems.

The Alliance for Nursing Informatics wants its members to ask for and access their personal health records as part of a collaborative effort to Ask for Your e-Health Record. During National Health IT Week: September 10-14, all ANI organizations will join forces to ask their members, nurses and clinical colleagues to reach out for their own digital medical information.

Advocate Health Care, one of the nation’s top health systems and the largest integrated health care system in the state of Illinois, and GE Healthcare, a national leader in low dose, high performance imaging, have announced a joint effort to help further reduce radiation dose in Computed Tomography (CT).

TextSpeak has released the TTS-EM-HD2, a small yet all-inclusive voice synthesis paging and announcement product. Targeted to deploy with unified hospital communications, the stand-alone package requires only a single digital input signal to produce spoken audio.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has announced the next steps in the Obama administration’s work to help doctors and hospitals use electronic health records.

Group Health has selected Intelligent InSites to help make medical centers of the future a reality today.

By Mary Carr, RN, BSN, CPN

Each year, the experts at ECRI Institute release a “Top 10” C-Suite Watch List, enumerating upon the most important “technology-related issues” that health system leaders should pay attention to in the next 365 days. And, when applicable, the ECRI experts even suggest solutions.

Medication errors are among the most common and preventable causes of harm to pediatric patients. Often, these errors are related to incorrect dosing because pediatric medication doses are weight-based, unlike the standard dosing units used for adult patients, and the recommended dosages given in terms of kilograms. But children are still weighed on scales that read in pounds or kilograms.

By Tim Kelly

On August 8, The Joint Commission released a Sentinel Event Alert titled “Safe use of opioids in hospitals.” Sentinel events are unexpected occurrences involving death, serious injury, or the risk thereof. Hospitals must immediately investigate and respond to sentinel events, and The Joint Commission reviews organizations’ responses to sentinel events as part of its accreditation surveys.

Boarding in emergency departments, which is at the root of crowding and potentially dangerous wait times, could be virtually eliminated by implementing a number of strategies proven to improve efficiency, but federal regulation may be required to bring those strategies into widespread use.